WD Everest V Smart Hotswap

[Jared]

I'm working on a nightmare of an Everest V family drive. The customer tried to free the heads themselves and ended up damaging the SA (amazingly the heads survived). I did composite read of the tracks and modules and was able to grab all the really critical modules and the CS checks out on all of them. However there are a ton of less critical modules that couldn't be read. I've tried writing the composite tracks to the donor and then replacing all the damaged modules with ones from a donor. However the donor drive will still never ID, I'm thinking the tracks are just too messed up.

Has anyone ever managed to pull off a smart hotswap by just moving modules over and not writing all the tracks? Or have any other ideas what I can try here.

 

[Jared]

Update: I finally managed to get a working smart hot swap drive set up. Issue with this one seemed to be that module 01 was gone, and it seems to vary quite a bit between different drives. I started noticing that if I used different ones, different sets of modules would show as bad/good.

I finally on about the 5th one found one that must have been the right modules directory, replaced the bad ones, and now it ID's. Let's hope now the data is in better shape than the SA was.