If you broke the pin of ROM while desoldering, don't cry - maybe not all is lost ! Topic is solved

[igen]

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Hello all,

Recently I had an interesting case ..

The customer brought a 2.5 "nativ USB Toshiba external HDD.
He also brought pcb sata which he had bought online.

Unfortunately - this man wanted to save add several bucks and didn't take advantage service (the extra) transplant ROM chip.


He did it himself ...

As a result (of his joyful creativity) he broke pin no. 8 (line Vcc 2.5V - power supply of ROM).
This guy didn't even notice it.

The broken pin (with a piece of chip) remained on the nativ USB PCB - see photo's below:

20210903_144303.jpg (520.56 KiB) Viewed 179559 times

20210903_145909.jpg (220.51 KiB) Viewed 179559 times

He just soldered the ROM chip to the sata board and ..... the disk is dead.

Then it ended up in my DR company.

I put the ROM chip under the microscope.
Unfortunately - I didn't see any path, no thread, no microjoints - just a rough and crumbled chip fragment.

This is difficult situation, because this is ROM of Toshiba.

This is the end... ? Game over ?

Absolutely not !!!

I had an idea.

Here's what I did.
See photo's below:

20210903_143656.jpg (226.04 KiB) Viewed 179559 times

20210903_144101.jpg (436.41 KiB) Viewed 179559 times

I decided to do similar to the cards or microSD (spider).
I connected the ROM chip to the outside of the SATA PCB so as to have open access to the ROM pins (during HDD works).
There are no very high frequencies or high amperage here - so it can be done with short wires.
Seven wires were soldered to undamaged pins.
And the eighth (on a longer cable) was soldered to the smal sharp needle.

I put everything under the microscope and connected to the PC3K.
Then, I very gently insert the point of needle (looking under the microscope) and more to press in various places of the damaged pin hole (crater) and turn on the power on the PC3K whenever.
After a few attempts - pounded needle point she had to touched the ROM power line and the HDD started !

I quickly launched Toshiba utils and downloaded the ROM.
Then .... it's just that a piece of cake.
100% data recovered - happily, in this case only native PCB USB were damaged.

So - summing up:
Physical damage pins of chips ROM with adaptive data (toshiba, seagate or hitachi) does not always have to end up with irretrievable data loss.

I hope that this way will help someone.

I greet everyone.



P.S.
Of course - this method doesn't always have to work - but I think in such cases you need to try ....


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[d_d_recovery]

Good work.

[igen]

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Thanks d_d_recovery.

Curiosity - you don't have to hold the needle point (in the ROM) all the time.
You can also recover data directly after boot - as long as the HDD has no problems with the surface, heads and SA.

When booting the disk, the instructions are downloaded from the ROM to the DSP memory - so it only takes a few seconds for the needle to contact the damaged line in the ROM chip.
After this time, you can remove the needle - the HDD drive will works normally without ROM power.

I do not know how soft reset or hard reset reacts - maybe they need to be turned off in DE.
Of course it is also not possible to perform power on/off.

Therefore (it is safe) - if this method will work and if the drive boots correctly - at the first you need to download the ROM image !!!

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[O.S]

Hi..
I had same situation in , but I went to my dentist friend, he used his turbine dental drill handpiece, and drilled a hole above broken leg , I planted a donor leg token from an old PCs ROM IC, and filled a paste tin, finally hot gun -spam the rest .
Job Done , ROM continent had been extract successfully .

[300ddr]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing!