Seagate 18 TB HDD PCB replacement

[Fraser Corrance]

Hello folks!

I have a client who brought in 2 x 18 TB 3.5 inch SATA drives (ST18000NM000J) that he broke the SATA fittings on. I picked up a couple PCBs off of eBay with the same part number and revision as the broken PCBs. I moved the ROM chips over to the new PCBs and neither drive spins up now. 

Is there some trick to moving the ROM chip(s) on this model of drive that I am not aware of??

Thank you in advance. 

Fraser

[Claude Barras]

So there's two ROM per PCB? You moved both ?

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[Fraser Corrance]

These are the chips I moved.

[pbzcbf...@gmail.com]

Is there a digital signature error in terminal? If so, then the MCU has a key. You need to transfer the adaptives to the donor ROM(s).

Or fix the PCB.

[Claude Barras]

Did you try to read and assembled the rom, then unlock and write back to chipset ?

Le mar. 12 mai 2026 à 21:20, pbzcbf...@gmail.com <pbzcbf...@gmail.com> a écrit :

Is there a digital signature error in terminal? If so, then the MCU has a key. You need to transfer the adaptives to the donor ROM(s).

Or fix the PCB.

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[Alandata Recovery]

I just did one of this board.

read the rom through terminal but apparently pc3k only gets 1 rom.

then had to remove chips and read with a programmer

assemble as raid in pc3k

unlock rom and write back.

Then if you want to change the head map in rom .... repeat the process.

Maybe next time I should unlock the rom and pre-emptively set head map to 0-1111111111111

Then I might be able to fix head map in ram later.

Anybody try this approach ?

If pc3k can only access 1 om in terminal then I presume you cant edit the head map in rom with terminal. - correct?

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[Fraser Corrance]

So I am not able to get terminale to even see that the drive is connected. No terminal output at all. 

[Alandata Recovery]

on my st10000 ace said

Warning message menas that drive has two rom chips on the PCB.
In utiltiy we can read only one rom.

In this case necessary to read both ROM chips using external programmer with 1.8 Volts support.
Open these two dumps as a RAID ROM,
then apply patch and save ROM to two separete files.
Then write them back to native chips on the PCB using the same programmer with 1.8 Volts support.
After that SED be bypassed for getting a firmware access.

Do not mix chips when will write prepared dumps.

Did you test the output with the broken sata before removing the roms?

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[Eastcoast Data Recovery]

Before going any further, confirm with Ace that this model isn't MCU encrypted.  

Afaik, this model is exactly like one that I had a few months back with a hole through the PCB.  

Ace said it was MCU encrypted and the only way to recover was a chip swap of ROM and MCU.  The drive wouldn't spin or operate otherwise.

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[Artem Rubtsov]

These drives have ROMs locked to the MCU.

PCB is not easily replaceable.

I think if you can find a donor's PCB with the same FW revision you could use donor's BootFW in ROM, it has embedded MCU signature hash.   

[Eastcoast Data Recovery]

Thanks Artem.

That's good into to know. 

Before I bad mouth TS, I checked my ticket previously and all TS said was I needed to swap both ROMs and MCU so they didn't say it was MCU encrypted. 

Hope you can get it without swapping the MCU Fraser.  

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[Alandata Recovery]

seems easier to swap / repair the sata connector

I had one like this and solder a good connector directly

I have also used a piece of card board as a shim and carefully slid the sata cable over the pins and the cardboard - worked to get the data....

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[Data Recovery Guru]

Me too, though on some models due to how the plastic mold is built around the interface, it could be a PITN to swap.

With that in mind, due to high price of Helium hard drives, I have experienced many customers insist on repair rather than data recovery.

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[Fraser Corrance]

The drives are out of a zpool array and are full of data used in an AI server. Replacing the SATA and power fittings did cross my mind but I am not that good at soldering and my previous attempts at doing this did not go so well using hot air and an iron. The drives a referbs and if they didn't have data I would have told him to just replace them. I had to explain to him why referb drives are a bad idea and putting them in a zpool is an even worse idea. 

Talked to Ace and these drives do need to have the MCU moved as well as the ROM chips. I guess they saw how much fun WD was having with encryption and they got a case of FOMO.....lol.

Thanks for all the feedback folks!

f.