Hi,

I have a WD15EADS drive. I need to repair this drive, because the client has a software, that is checking for the drives serial number, it's hard coded into the program and the program is signed. So the easiest way is just to repair the drive.

The drive had the typical WD slow responding problem, I was able to fix it with PC3k, so now the drive was responding "quite normally". I was able to low level format the drive with full speed, everything looked fine. Then I put the MBR on the drive and created a NTFS partition. Windows took about 5 minutes to format the drive. And if I now reboot the PC with the drive (with empty partition) plugged into the machine, Windows takes about 5 minutes to boot. But when Windows is up and running, I can copy files to this drive with full speed.

Can some one tell me, what's wrong with this drive?

Why don't you just change the serial number of a good drive to suit, using PC3K?

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That's the second solution, but I'm trying to avoid it, because then I have a wrong serial number on the sticker of the drive. And if a technician of the software company gets the drive and checks the serial number, it can cause some problems.

PS: I just tried to change MBR to GPT, and the drive worked normally again. Unfortunately I have to use MBR.

Did you test drive for slow sectors and bad sectors?

Hmmm....

Now it's getting weird.
I checked all heads, they are fine.
So I run the Logical surface test. I got a lot of errors like this:



I tried to go to the LBA with Sector-Edit and it worked for me. I was able to read the sector and write to it.

So in the next step I run the Logical surface test again, but now with the write option but now I get absolutely no errors.

What's wrong??

You do realize that WD slow responding fix is a temporary solution to a failing drive right? The bug is caused by the development of large numbers of bad sectors causing the G-List to overfill. So while you can disable the autoallocation, you haven't fixed the bad sector issues and it'll eventually fail miserably. The fix only masks the symptoms so you can image it at a reasonable speed.

New drive, image, change serial, done!

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Can you switch the metal covers?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

It's a WD drive. The heads are held in place by the cover. And if I remove the screw, there is no way, I can put the heads in the same position, they were before. For DR this procedure is OK, but not for a drive in a more or less productive environment.

But there is a thing, I can't understand.
If I run the test, I get LBA errors. But when I use the sector edit tool, I can edit the LBA, that couldn't be read before.

And if I choose the writing test, then there is no error at all. But there is also no general problem with the reading part of the head.

Slow problem comes when many bad sector on the drive may be after low level format some bad sector still remain..!!

What ever you do will NOT fix the drive, its like a bandage
The drive WILL come back to you sooner than later in a worse stage as mentioned above
Bin it buy a new one change the serial as stated above

On second thought
sort it out with the software company problem solved

Not quite true on that model...

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