Hardrive Motherboard replacement question

[chublake]

I have a Western Digital 1.5T External Hard Drive that died on me. I took the Hard Drive out of the external casing and plugged it directly into the inside of my computer to see if it was the external part. My computer still would not recognize it, but I could hear the Hard Drive inside spinning. I read somewhere that if your Hard Drive is spinning your data could be fine and the motherboard is what died, and you can replace the motherboard on the Hard Drive with another motherboard from same working Hard Drive and you might be able to get your data off it.
Is swapping out the motherboard on the Hard Drive something I could try or would I be wasting my time?

 

[MindoverMaster]

Does it show up in Disk Management? Might need to change the letter.

Try a Live-CD of Ubuntu. See if it can detest the hard drive at all.

 

[chublake]

It does not show up in Disk Management and I did run Ubuntu and it did not detest it.

 

[KSoD]

If the drive is not detected at all in the BIOS then the mother board on the unit is dead. Since you can still hear it spinning up, there is a chance that replacing the mobo on the drive itself could save your data. But it is not guaranteed.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Does the drive work on any other computer system? If it doesn't, that would rule out your motherboard being bad.

 

[chublake]

If the drive is not detected at all in the BIOS then the mother board on the unit is dead. Since you can still hear it spinning up, there is a chance that replacing the mobo on the drive itself could save your data. But it is not guaranteed.

It is detected in the BIOS.

Does the drive work on any other computer system? If it doesn't, that would rule out your motherboard being bad.

I am unable to try it on another system. The other computer I have has Parallel ATA connections and the hard drive has SATA.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Try it on a friend's system. Hope that doesn't cost you any money.