Strange WD Europa Failures

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
In the area where I live WD Europa family drives don't seem to be too common. Then all of the sudden I get in two, nearly identical models, manufactured the same month, both from HP laptops, that come in on the exact same day. Plus they have the same symptoms, a bit of clicking then they shut down.

Normally I'd just assume bad heads, but the strange thing is that neither drive will allow me to even try adjusting the headmap in RAM. They both give a strange error I've never seen: "Data checking error.........: BYTE[0] = FF"

Even after LDR upload (using the drive's own LDR I managed to read) still won't allow RAM headmap edit.

Is anyone else having strange issues with these drives? I'm wondering if HP may have pushed out a bad FW update or something.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
The two drives are WD5000BEKT-75KA90 and -60KA90.

Can't say I've even encountered encrypted SA before. The modules I managed to read look normal. I was able to read them because one of the drives did come ready for about a minute before shutting back down. Haven't been able to replicate it yet.

I'm still guessing it's bad preamp, but the coincidence that they both showed up like this the same day seems odd to me.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Update:

I just finally got around to opening the second drive that came in in the clean room, and it's definitely bad heads (and platters for that matter). So I guess it's just a coincidence that two came in with exact symptoms. Just seemed strange.
 
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