Does anyone have any advice (other than sending to a professional data recovery service) for how to access data on an HDD whose controller card stopped working, and refuse to accept a spare controller card taken from a brand new identical HDD?
There is specialized hardware (and software) to be able to extract the data and save on another board's memory, but the poorman's way is that of transferring the actual chip from the old board to the new (identical) one.
This, commonly referred to as "ROM swap" is not particularly difficult[1] as the chip is usually a rather simple 8 pin one, if you are not into this kind of things a hardware repair shop (like a phone repair one) will normally make this work for you.
However newish hard disks may have not this separate chip, it has to be seen which model yours is.
Here is a site with some more info:
https://hddpcb.eu/gb/content/how-to-swap-hdd-pcb
[1] meaning that it can be done DIY if you are familiar enough with soldering/desoldering components
A good half of "failed" drives can be made to work for at least a few hours longer with that method.
Unlike OP, If you see signs of life, don't mess with clamps or reflowing. Just leave it in the freezer/oven while you take data off it, with longish power/sata cables to a machine just outside the freezer/oven door.
I recommend GNU ddrescue for getting data off - when you only have a few hours of service life left till it is dead-dead, it maximizes data recovery in a given time. There are various ways to generate a mapfile to skip recovering free blocks, which are worth using if you suspect the drive is mostly empty.
That said, if you ever have a drive with absolutely critical, must-have data, don't bother with any of this and just ship it to professionals. You'll pay dearly, but they'll get your data out.
Note that many controllers store parts of their firmware/config on the disk platter, so without the disk platter the board may not show up via sata.
The drives are 3.5" 2TB WD Green purchased around 2012, and had been in use for about 1 year when they both died.
If that's not a typo, then it seems like those drives have been powered off for about 10 years.
I think powered off hard drives are commonly said to retain data for um... maybe 3 years (from rough memory). So, your drives have probably lost their magnetism (and thus the data). :(
The only issue that may happen on an unpowered for several years hard disk is so called bearing seizing, the (fluid) bearing of the motor/platter may become stuck, but it is relatively rare, though some particular make/models are more prone to this, and though (usually) fixable, in some cases it can be made to rotate freely again, but you need the services of a specialized service, as the disk needs to be opened, in some other cases the bearing can be replaced, and some specialized tools are needed:
That reminds me of a work colleague a few years ago. He got an ancient drive working again by tapping it on the side with a screwdriver while powering it on, to get it "unstuck".
HPe had two rounds of enterprise SSDs that failed because the uptime counter overflowed, but I never saw content about fixing those after the fact. And I think I had seen a different SSD uptime based failure a year or so before.
IMHO, it's best to avoid same batch storage, and if that's not possible, stagger the online time to try to give enough time to notice a failure, obtain replacement storage, install replacement stotage, and migrate data. Backups are important too, but it's nicer to have a path towards mostly online recovery. And some mostly replacable data is hard to justify backups for (do I need three copies of format shifted media? probably not, if my online storage fails, I can re-rip)
I don't recall hearing about this for Western Digital drives, but there's some xbox360 stuff that I thought involved the ttl serial on WD drives... It's certainly worth exploring. WD green drives do also have a very short default timeout to park the drive, and as a result can experience a large number of parking cycles in some applications, and the parking ramp can wear out; I don't think this is really recoverable, the heads are likely to get damanged and debris may damage the platters.
This happened only on some disk drives because it was initially triggered by a defective testing equipment only on some production lines, see "Root cause" here:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate...
If you've got the controller board your drive wants and still nothing, then its time for professional help or considering the data lost, imo.
I don't know how complex HDDs have got, but I recall giggling at someone installing linux on an HDD controller board several years ago. So I bet its much worse now.
Ah, so you don't really need that data...
Because if you really need the data then you go to people who makes a living by recovering data.
But if you are okay to lose the if unsuccessful then it's okay to try, but you should know/tell that beforehand.
Reading through the other comments - you have a very low chance to succeed, because if you want to swap controller boards then you need to move adaptive data too, as other had said.
But I'm curios what exactly happened, WD Green from 2012 are not the worst drives out there. How exactly they failed, what happens now when you power them on, with SATA connected, without? Did you try external USB2SATA converters/boxes?
I'm pretty decent with soldering iron and hot-air gun. Migrating the SMD flash/EEPROM chip shouldn't be too hard.
>"But I'm curios what exactly happened, WD Green from 2012 are not the worst drives out there. How exactly they failed, what happens now when you power them on, with SATA connected, without? Did you try external USB2SATA converters/boxes?"
The discs spin up but the controller no longer communicates with the host. The computer doesn't see that the drives are attached to the SATA bus. There were no signs of problems coming, they just suddenly stopped working from one power-up to the next. I tried with different motherboards and a couple of SATA-USB bridges, all same result.
Well, good luck then.
> The discs spin up but the controller no longer communicates with the host
Now this is strange, if the controller would be dead then there would be no spin-up. If you hear the heads working than the controller is definitely not dead.
You tried to search forums dedicated to data recovery with your exact P/N?
But nowadays a drive controller is far more complex, e.g. it might implement transparent hardware AES encryption, in which case swapping the board loses the key. And I've no doubt there are many modern manufacturing-related tricks for yield that go into them as well, any of which might make a different set of platters than what was shipped unreadable.