That's outdated advice, unfortunately. You can't do this with most hard drives anymore. To use one of my most-loathed manufacturers as an example (and the worst offender when it comes to hard drive recoveries), Western Digital stores head calibration data in two places: in the system area on the platters, and in an eprom on the circuit board. Both sets of data are matched at the factory and have to stay matched.

You can replace the circuit board on a WD drive with a match from the exact same model, from the same factory, manufactured the same day (guessing by the serial number anyway), and the drive will still fail to give you your data back.

When the system area becomes unreadable or doesn't match the contents of the eprom on the controller board, WD drives will show up in BIOS with a generic model name and no other information about the drive. There's no easy way to coax them into cooperating.

If you're lucky, you have one of the WD models with an accessible eprom on the controller board, and you might be able to either desolder and swap it with the replacement board, or, if you have the appropriate equipment, use a special clothespin-like tool to latch on to the chip's pins, read its data out, and write that to the donor board. If you're unlucky, the eprom is integrated into another chip, and nothing short of some pretty expensive equipment will be able to handle it.

However, at this point, almost everyone that doesn't work at a professional data recovery lab is waaaay over their heads, and only making the recovery job harder (or impossible) for the lab.

Additionally, a lot of WD drives now have the head stack spindle mounted by a screw to the top cover; once you pull the top cover, you've lost the head calibration for the drive. Getting any data off the platters at all at that point requires a moderately expensive homebrew tool with several calipers that screws into the head stack spindle; you manually adjust calibration until data starts coming in reliably.

We no longer do physical data recoveries in our shop; about the end of last year these piece-of-crap drives started coming in, and none of the old tricks worked on them. We looked into the equipment (and subsequent training) required to do these sorts of recoveries, with an eye towards providing very-low-cost recoveries (since we have plenty of other revenue streams), and we simply can't afford the initial $15,000 outlay for it.

We've made it our mission this year to get effective data backups working for every single one of our clients.

TL;DR: swapping controller boards and other tricks no longer work. You really really really need to have backups.

I did this once when a 120GB Western Digital hard drive failed on me. Spent several months searching ebay for "used" listings with actual images of the drive for sale, matched up the WD P/N, swapped the pcb boards, and was able to recover a year's worth of lost photos. Then I re-swaped the pcb boards and resold the "used" drive back on ebay. Good times:)