SilverPuppy
New member
Success! Long and winding road that I'm sure my client wished would have taken less time.
First I tried to recover the contents of IC602 using ICSP with a moderately-priced 866A USB programmer only to discover it didn't support ICSP on SPI25 chips. After feeling totally betrayed that an ICSP programmer wouldn't support it on probably THE MOST common micro flash chip of them all, I ordered a very cheap CH341A and attempted ICSP with that. After revising the design of the programmer so the voltages were correct, I was able to confirm that the chip had data on it, but not read it reliably, much less write anything. Having the USB power on made no difference.
Long and short of it, after trying desperately to avoid using hot air on those chips because of the remote possibility of cooking the damaged board's chip and losing the data forever, I ended up using hot air, not cooking the chip, transferring it over, and the drive boots up and runs as designed. I did use the CH341A solder-only chip adapter board as a layover on the flight to the undamaged PCB, since the long solder pads on the adapter make the chip reattach at a much lower temperature than the actual drive PCB, so I figured I'd drop it in the reader and take a backup of it first. Having done that and knowing that I could now burn a replacement on the IC602 from the donor board, I soldered the data chip in the donor board and put it back together. The original drive is alive with its original IC602 on its replacement PCB and IS backed up now.
Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it. The forum calls me a noob, which I'm definitely not, but having been out of data recovery for awhile, the world has definitely changed somewhat, and you helped me get back up to speed. Merry Christmas, a happy new year, and we'll meet again.
First I tried to recover the contents of IC602 using ICSP with a moderately-priced 866A USB programmer only to discover it didn't support ICSP on SPI25 chips. After feeling totally betrayed that an ICSP programmer wouldn't support it on probably THE MOST common micro flash chip of them all, I ordered a very cheap CH341A and attempted ICSP with that. After revising the design of the programmer so the voltages were correct, I was able to confirm that the chip had data on it, but not read it reliably, much less write anything. Having the USB power on made no difference.
Long and short of it, after trying desperately to avoid using hot air on those chips because of the remote possibility of cooking the damaged board's chip and losing the data forever, I ended up using hot air, not cooking the chip, transferring it over, and the drive boots up and runs as designed. I did use the CH341A solder-only chip adapter board as a layover on the flight to the undamaged PCB, since the long solder pads on the adapter make the chip reattach at a much lower temperature than the actual drive PCB, so I figured I'd drop it in the reader and take a backup of it first. Having done that and knowing that I could now burn a replacement on the IC602 from the donor board, I soldered the data chip in the donor board and put it back together. The original drive is alive with its original IC602 on its replacement PCB and IS backed up now.
Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it. The forum calls me a noob, which I'm definitely not, but having been out of data recovery for awhile, the world has definitely changed somewhat, and you helped me get back up to speed. Merry Christmas, a happy new year, and we'll meet again.
![Amarbir[CDR-Labs]](/forum/data/avatars/m/0/68.jpg?1635193559){kind=avatar}