1TB WD1001FALS no data access

[Sam]

This 1TB WD had a visibly blown-up motor control chip. With hot swap, drive stayed busy but stayed spinning. ROM is embedded in microcontroller chip.

Replaced blown motor control chip and extracted ROM info. Programmed to donor PCB. Drive powered on and stayed busy. Figured preamp took damage with the power surge.

With new heads, drive comes ready and IDs. Only FW mod I wasn't able to read was Mod109 from SA0 but got it from SA1 and wrote it to SA0. Can't view sectors in HEX. On DDI, can build heads map and media test is all red A--abort error.

Read/write test reports H0 is in read-only mode.

Same results with patient PCB (with repaired motor chip) and donor with extracted ROM written to it.

I suspect it needs a translator regeneration but I haven't encountered this specific issue before and was hoping to get a consensus.

Thanks!
Sam

 

[w.simon]

What tools do you have ?

I would play with headmap in ram first then perhaps translator regen

Good luck keep us updated !

 

[Sam]

Thanks for the reply w.simon!

For WD drives I'm using the SD tool. I do have the ability to edit head map in ROM. I also forgot to add that I was able to run a heads test on all heads individually and they had 0 read/write errors.

Is there the possibility a translator regen could cause data loss? As I have all modules backed up, am I correct in assuming if it fails I can write it back (I think it's mod 31 on this drive).

 

[lcoughey]

In theory, with all the SA modules backed up, you can revert back if the translator regeneration were to make things worse. But, using SD tools, I'm less confident.

If you were using PC3K, I'd suggest running the slow responding fix to see if that helps. Unlikely, but I have seen it happen.

 

[w.simon]

I had one time an WD (Not remeber the right model) that i was thinking about head, because bacame ready then stay bsy makes a click and spin down.
But after slow fix, i was able to clone it with a few bad sectors ...

With SD tools, you are little stuck, i have no idea how you can deal with it.
I would go in head Map in Ram and change headmap to something like 0/0/0 or 1/1/1 to try make the translator initialize well.

Keep us updated

 

[Jared]

I just had one earlier this week that would ID and go ready, could even read sectors. But then randomly, whether imaging or not it would click/beep once and get stuck busy. Slow responding fix made the drive stable and imaged 100% with no bad sectors. First time I've seen that too.

 

[Sam]

Thanks for all the responses guys!

Well, this ended up being like 3 recoveries in one (gotta love those). First, the charred motor controller IC on a PCB with ROM embedded in MCU... Second, bad preamp and needed a head swap.... Third, drive would init and ID but no data access. Overcame the last by making a smart donor. I thought I'd also share a couple of interesting things that led up to successful creation of the smart donor.
Patient drive is a WD1001FALS-00E8B0. Matched all regular criteria for donor. After head swap is when patient would init and ID but no data access. I could read all FW mods at that point and SD's read/write test of FW mods said that Head 0 was in read-only mode.

My next step was to attempt to make a smart donor but all I had was a -00J7B0 with different ROM and FW version and that didn't go so well to the point that I couldn't get the drive to ID any more. The DCM was nowhere near patient, it was manufactured a year later, and preamp sticker had different first few characters as patient and 1st donor, but slider pattern matched original patient heads. So I put those heads in my 1st donor (whose heads were in the patient), and wouldn't you know--it initialized and ID'd.

Wrote patient mods to it but with hot swap still couldn't view sectors. After some tinkering, finally tried to READ the mods I had written and all had read failures. Aha.
Swapped heads between this drive and patient. Did this because heads in each drive always pass SD's read/write test when I run it in each individual head. I'm thinking maybe I've got an adaptives mismatch and heads will work better in another drive.
Now patient has heads from 2nd donor -00J7B0 with donor matching criteria that shouldn't work and 1st donor has its original heads back in. At this point wrote patient mods to donor again and WAS able to read them back. Was finally able to view sectors with hot swap.

Started up the DDI with smart donor and swapped in the patient and images with no read timeouts at ~30mb/sec. After about 15 seconds of imaging, no matter on what head, I will start to get read timeouts until I skip about 10k sectors. Programmed this into the algorithm and let it run for a few minutes. Then I called it quits for the weekend.

But guess what--a couple times it did just go busy as Jared described above. Had to swap out the patient with smart donor to get it going again. First thing Monday I'll try slow responding fix and post the results!

Sam

 

[Sam]

Follow-up:

Slow fix didn't help with stability on this case. I've got most of the data now but had to do about 100 hot swaps with the smart donor on the Deepspar.

 

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

Follow-up:

Slow fix didn't help with stability on this case. I've got most of the data now but had to do about 100 hot swaps with the smart donor on the Deepspar.

Excellent Samick ,
Here is my small experience with tools .But before i tell you can you tell me what all tools you have ,when you say salvation what in salvation you have .I also see you mentioned ddi you have ver 4 or 3 ? .

 

[Sam]

Hi Amarbir,

I started with a set of used SD tools: Seagate, WD, Hitachi, and Maxtor. I ended up hard-wiring many connections to get rid of the flakiness.
I then got a DDI4. After about a year, almost every time I started it I was getting an error like "DDI not found". Instead of sending it back for repair and being down for who knows how long, I reflowed every single solder joint on the board and since then it's been a beast running almost every day for 3 years!
About 3 months ago I got a second DDI4 to help with the load. I also got a DFL Seagate tool around that same time.
I bought the PC3K about a month ago. I had a "trial by fire" learning experience with it, having to manually rebuild a NRGlist when the automatic translator recovery failed to produce results. Had to dig deep into the documentation and online tutorials (and maybe had a little bit of luck!).

Sam