Hi have a Passport ultra which was dropped, I originally plugged it in by USB and was able to read the ROM and a number of modules using WDMarvell before it stopped working very shortly after.

Since then I've replaced the heads on it multiple times but haven't been able to get it to initialise again. With different donor heads it responds the same, it will spin up and stay spinning for about a minute, then click once, then spin for about another minute, the click once again then spin down. No other strange noises.

The weird thing is if I change the regions and load an overlay and load DIR into ram and change the regions back in RAM I can access all modules and they all read without any errors (both copies) (except 6F) but I checked 6F on an identical drive and it gave a bad checksum too.

The other weird thing is WDMarvell has the checkbox selected for SED drive, but I was able to access the ROM and some modules initially over USB. I don't think I've ever seen that happen before, normally with SED drives the SA is locked.

Anyone got any ideas? Thanks

read slow-fix on WD on this forum, I think this is what you need to do.
Best approach would be to out source it with someone who has atleast MRT or PC3000 because they can deal with all later issues e.g bas sectors, decryption etc.

good luck

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Data Recovery Pakistan

I have tried modifying Mod02 to apply the slow fix but no luck. I've seen the slow fix problem many times with these drives and doesn't usually display symptoms like this. Mod32 has no pending reallocation sectors.

Did you swapped to a compatibel SATA-PCB?

Yes, can't do much over USB swapping to SATA was one of the first things I did.