Since many years (like 15 or more) the PCB of a hard disk contains a chip (essentially an eeprom or flash device) containing so-called "adaptive data", a set of

Since many years (like 15 or more) the PCB of a hard disk contains a chip (essentially an eeprom or flash device) containing so-called "adaptive data", a set of data written in the factory that are specific to the disk drive (head/platters) the PCB is mounted on. 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 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