Ok, so that is one more chore out of the way
The short story is It didn't work.
The long story is:
I'm calling the original Hdd,
Hdd A (the one that died) and the donor Hdd,
Hdd B. Both are 500 Gig capacity.
The first thing I noticed was that the physical arrangement of the motor terminals and the tacho feedback terminals were different, though by the time the ribbon cable reached the pcb, all was in order. (compare images.)
The next thing I found was that the attachment of the ribbon to the pcb has a small black plastic locking piece that only needs loosening, not removing, to release the cable from the pcb.
I took the pcb from
Hdd B and fitted it to
Hdd A, then connected it to the computer and attempted to boot up.
It would not boot, in fact there were a lot of never before seen messages displayed, finally telling me to insert a bootable disk and press enter.
I then tried to load LINUX, but the installation program reported that the
Hdd had zero bytes capacity.
So I concluded that
Hdd A might find some future use as a door stopper of maybe a light boat anchor.
Next I replaced original pcb back onto
Hdd B and connected it to computer. When I tried to boot up, (it had a working windoze os installed), I was presented with another screen full of exotic messages the same as the earlier attempt with
Hdd A, however when I set about installing LINUX, all went well.
My conclusion is that the crash of
Hdd A was in deeper towards the platters, or maybe the motor. (I couldn't see the point in testing the motor) Even if an Hdd crash is caused by a pcb failure, data recovery by means of a pcb swap from another compatible donor hdd is just not going to happen. I know that the Linux installation would have offered to install alongside the windoze installation if it could have found it.
So there was no way data was going to be recovered by this method.
I have included a few images to try to give some graphical meaning to what I have written.
Ahhh well see next post or two. I'm going to have to scale them down a byte or 2