Data recovery from a 3.5 SATA HD

Consider a hard drive that you are almost certain the platters, pointer and motor are physically OK but you suspect the chip set\firmware on the external part of the board is defective. In this case you can tell the drive wont spin up and a chip gets very hot. I suppose the drive could be locked up but for the sake of this question consider that its not.
Has anyone had any experience with replacing the external electronics on the drive with an identical board? If the firmware and everything was exact is there something else like the calibration of the pointer to track 0 or other consideration that would keep it from working? Thanks for your thoughts.