Hello everyone,

I am working with a broken VAM51JJ0 Fireball 3 40 GB hard drive. The drive appears to spin up, but various recovery tools, including Linux, report that Sector 0 cannot be read. Suspecting the PCB, I purchased a compatible drive and tried both cold swap and hot swap of the PCB, using MHDD. This has no affect on the problem at hand. I also later verified that the original PCB is functional, but doing a hot swap of it onto a donor drive.

This leads me to believe that the issue lies with the head assembly. My next course of action is do a platter swap from the broken drive into the donor drive. I have had some success with this before, and of course, some failures. Before I go this route, can anyone else offer any advice?

Here are the symptoms in MHDD:

Original PCB with the original drive:

Drive will not INIT, will not CX. SCAN produces all "!" and quite a few different errors.

Hot-swap of donor PCB with original drive:

Drive INITs, drive CXs. SCAN does produces an output where the first sector is an X, some following sectors are read, somewhat slowly. If I advance to LBA 500,000 and higher, SCAN works quite well.

I am hoping that I won't find platter damage.... Any advice is highly appreciated.

Dmitry

Did you check the G-List?

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Please pardon my ignorance. What's the G-List? I did match the model number and revisions of the donor and source drives. I also matched the key numbers on the Maxtor bar code sticker at the bottom drive.

Its not a PCB problem .
If the drive is producing !!! errors it means its a fw issue which cannot be solved be MHDD u need to find a pro .

I cannot find a pro in this case. It's not in the budget. My next trick is going to be swapping the platters, which should bypass any fw issues, I would think. Is there anything else I could do (besides finding a pro) before I go this route?

The trouble is that the firmware is right on the platters you're going to "swap"...

Thanks, I understand. From what you are describing, it is likely that a platter swap could be a futile effort.

What's preventing me from letting this go is that I had some success with a hot PCB swap. If I do a hot PCB swap, I can do a SCAN on the damaged drive in the later sectors (LBA 500,000 and later) without any issues. Since this happens to be an OS drive with user data, my data should be somewhat accessible. It seems that I have some damage in the sector area between 0 and 63 (Sector 0 included). SCAN always fails on the first sector. This probably means that the drive will not be recognized by any conventional OS or DR tool. Maybe I could use ATOF/TOF in MHDD to write the sectors I can read to another media. I could then write those sectors to an identical working drive. Could this work?

Do I have any options besides PC-3000 or Salvation for fixing firmware issues? While their products are relatively inexpensive, they are not in the budget.

Thanks again,

Dmitry

I agree that this is not a PCB problem. Most common with this series is firmware corruption or head crash. Sometimes the G-List and SMART Log get corrupted and cause failure of other firmware modules. Swapping platters / heads will not improve matters and will likely make things worse.

On this model hot swap by itself won't help; you need to do [i]smart[/] hot swap, but you won't be able to do that without gear like the PC3000.

Jon

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

if this is the frist time for u working with harddrive. then I recommend you not to do any repair even you have the PC3K. PC3K can help you but you need to know how to work with it specially repair to get data. I m affraid you will make thing worse and damage data integrity in data area. Not just like simple thing. make it detected and you will get data.

thanks

_________________
Спасибо
СУТИОНО / АПИНГ

whats pcb hot swap , u mean normal pcb swap right ? u can try aff repairstation it quite cheap .

With SMART hot swap, you copy certain modules from bad hard drive to a donor, then do a regular hot swap from donor to bad drive. You need the PC3000 t do it.

Jon

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

Hi,

As far as I understand Smart hotswap is not an alternative and neither FW repair due to lack of tools/experience.
If U do a cloning with regular hotswap u will have shifts due to the difference in Plists of the 2 drives... U have to find a workaround to eliminate this, however at least u can have a hope to access your data...

pepe

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery