We have a bad Samsung HM121HJ 120GB laptop hard drive here that has stays constantly busy on power-up and never comes ready on the PC3000. The PC3000 can't even ID the drive or determine its capacity (shows up as .49MB).

We also have a working donor drive that is an exact match for the bad drive. This is the first drive of this type that we have worked on. Here is what we've have done/observed so far:

Swapping the PC board from the donor drive to the bad drive doesn't change the symptoms. Additionally, the donor drive will come ready with either PC board.

We have observed the behavior of the head assembly in our cleanroom with the drive cover off. On power up, the heads
will attempt to seek to the middle of the platter maybe a half-dozen times and then the drive spins down. the heads
and platter appear to be in perfect like-new condition.

We swapped the platter of the bad drive into the donor drive and now the donor drive has all the bad drive's symptoms. Additionally, swapping the platter of the donor drive into the body of the bad drive will cause the bad
drive to now come ready.

Swapping the two platters back to their original drives will cause the bad bad drive to stay busy as before and the donor drive will come ready as before.

So, the problem appears to be somewhere on the platter of the bad drive. We have carefully checked the condition of the platter and it is perfect, no scratches, scrapes, or dings anywhere. We suspect that the problem is some sort of corruption in the platter's SA.

It is our understanding that Samsung Drives have copies of the SA on every head but that the head 0 SA is the only one that is actually read during normal operation of the drive. If this is true, it should be possible to copy the "good" SA from head 1 to the head 0 SA.

So, What we are trying to figure out how to do is copy the "good" head 1 SA to head 0 and hopefully bring the drive back on line long enough to get the data off it.

The problem we are having is that since the drive always stays busy, the PC3000 isn't able to access the SA for reading or writing (or so it seems), so we can't copy and re-write the SA. Does anyone have any suggestions? "

2 questions rose:

1. did u also swap the heads together with the platters, or not?
2. Terminal report?

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Adatmentés - Data recovery