Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 7th, 2012, 8:26

WD10TPVT-00U4RT1 not recognised in BIOS. It responds ERR and BSY to identity command in mhdd. It goes off after mhdd continue with RECAL.
Drive spins up, but not usual recalibration (fast positioning) noise. It starts track to track seek, then the same, but higher frequency (probably return). Five attempts about 1 second duration each, then goes quiet. Not sure whever it spins down afterwards, as it is very silent.
Does it indicate read channel failure? If so, how to test whether it is PCB or preamp?
Or is it the way firmware corruption demonstrate on these drives?

Drive haven't been exposed to shock when stopped working. It came with external case LG HXD7, JM20329 USB converter.

Re: WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 7th, 2012, 15:16

Sounds like head problems.

Re: WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 7th, 2012, 19:48

pcimage wrote:Sounds like head problems.

I thought rather a read channel completely dead. Reason, heads are not failing suddenly and consistently no read, electronics does.
Should I try SCT mhdd scripts which I tested on earlier Royl drive? I have no other tools for new drives nor information on this one. I probably can't get from the drive, as it failed to read and initialize firmware.

Re: WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 7th, 2012, 20:15

SAjunky wrote:I thought rather a read channel completely dead. Reason, heads are not failing suddenly and consistently no read, electronics does.

I wish that would be true :)
However even that these symptoms can indicate bad heads or bad PCB, based on experience there is very high probability that it is bad heads

Re: WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 9th, 2012, 5:33

Thanks.
In attempt to determine which one, I executed three SCT scripts for Royl.
1. Reading ROM - success, but it doesn't seem to be complete ROM image.
2. SA rom extraction - it seems SCT command is rejected.
3. D-ram table scan (it would give cyl # and sectors/tr value) - as above
See attached log. Does it help to determine whether it is PCB or headstack?
Attachments
MHDDlog.ZIP
(877 Bytes) Downloaded 409 times

Re: WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 9th, 2012, 11:42

Here it is modified Jura script to read 256K ROM. It looks like it is the size of this ROM, see strings from last bytes (picture).
Attachments
Royl256.PNG
Royl256_ROMread.zip
(480 Bytes) Downloaded 393 times

Re: WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 9th, 2012, 18:17

Not a good idea to keep powering your drive on.

Damaged heads can cause permanent media damage rendering data not recoverable. Every time the drive is powered on you are taking an increasing risk in those bad heads scratching the media.

Hope it is not too late already.

A proper diagnostic with advanced tools by a pro can is the best course of action.

Re: WD Scorpio Blue not recognised

May 10th, 2012, 11:37

labtech wrote:Not a good idea to keep powering your drive on.

Obvious matter, would not do it if receiving configuration parameters of this drive on the forum. You didn't make comment to the results of scripts, you kept silent (knowing what was wrong), so I re-wrote script and tried again. And now it makes a problem, as it was successful.

All I want to do, is to determine I can read SA area with right parameters for SCT command. You can help or you don't.
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