Quantume Fireball LC15 30GB lc30a011 problem

[netw3rker]

OK, so let me start off by saying, this is a hobby of mine, and not a business (nor will it ever be one). And from the few posts I've made here on the forums, you can tell I'm just a beginner. so please be nice or helpful.. i'll take either! That being said, I have:

a) read nearly every post in the DR&R forum on quantum drives, and read the FAQ and 'newbies start here' articles
b) talked with several people here via private message about this problem
c) accepted that this process is complex and requires a ton of knowledge, learning, practice and tools
d) I also recognize that you guys hear this sorta thing dozens of times every day and my situation is really no different. but I have to start somewhere

so here's the situation. I have a quantum lC15 30GB (model LC30a011 with 'mac' firmware.. not that it makes a huge difference from what I can tell) with data that is only important in that I want to show that I can get it back. I'm 99% sure that it had a pre-amp problem, since it would initialize, and read data, just extremely slowly and with lots of what I'd call bouncing sounds (similar to the click of death but not repetitive and more like a pingpong ball). because it was able to read, I copied/cloned/reverse cloned what I could off the drive over the course of 3 weeks. when my cloning software said it was going to take 4 years (or more) to copy the last 50% of the data, I opted to try a head transplant since at the time I didn't know it was even possible to do a preamp swap.

so after some practice on scrap drives, special tool purchases, more practice, and more tools. i finally got confident enough that i could at least take MHA's off and put them back on w/o killing the drives (but never confirming that swapping the heads would actually work). So I fired up the clean room, and got started with the patient and a matching donor. the donor heads came off w/o a hitch but when i took the patients MHA off, they.. well.. broke. which puts me in the situation I'm in now.

So after reading up I've realized I pretty much just blew my chance at ever getting a solid read back from this drive because of the unique alignment issues (thanks for the explanation pepe) and adaptive configurations (thanks for the explanation BlackST). But this does lead me to a lot of new questions, and a possible approach for getting this data back.

Question 1) is it a safe assumption that head 0 (or whichever reads the sector/track data) is always aligned correctly with its respective information on the disk? if so then the ability for each donor head to read would be directly related to is alignment with its H0 in relation to the patients H0 - HX alignment correct?

question 2) if question 1 is the case, and assuming I swap the heads w/o breaking anything. what would happen if only H0 and H3 were in alignment? my assumption would be that the drive wouldn't initialize since the firmware couldn't be loaded (from H1), but would the serial mode startup test at least show any of the working heads?

that leads me to my current theory on how to get this working. assuming I had enough donors, could I initialize the PCB with a working drive, then, assuming I knew which heads were working on the patient post MHA swap, do a PCB hot swap to the patient, and have it only read the data from the working head? then repeat the process as I find other heads that line up?

I posed a similar question in a PM to a member here and they eluded to the fact that more than just h0 & hx need to line up to read data, but is that because of the firmware loading issue, or is that another problem all together?

I would love to be able to go in and just adjust the adaptives on the drive (presumably via pc3k) but the > 10k price tag on it kinda prevents this from being a possibility, and other cheaper solutions like salvation data aren't compatible with this drive. So does this approach sound at least somewhat valid, or is this merely the ramblings of a newbie?

Thanks in advance for all of your help!
-Chris

[BlackST]

- If you hear a "ping pong sound" and it initializes is not a preamp problem : it would have made some clicking sound, accelerate and spin down but NO init.

- In no way you can do a easy head swap on these Quantum(s) because of adaptives problem. You would likely destroy heads/media if you haven't done it before. Luckily the density is low.

- I didn't see the drive but I suspect either a firmware problem and / or a weak head. It requires analysis with proper equipment before doing everything else.

Note that some part of the Quantum drives structure is still , at present and after years from end-of-life of the products, unclear. So most part the pros know is from direct experience on-field.

About the adaptives : you can't do anything even with PC3000, I mean you don't have a control panel and set parameters... adaptives are a much more complicated thing involving physical parameters and electronics' settings. It's not like tuning a medium frequency or a crystal oscillator, we're talking about digital filters, FIR, and so on. It's not like the service settings on TVs.
With PC3000 you can copy one module borrowed from other drive but each drive has UNIQUE settings. Copy the module , turn of then on and you won't be able to init the drive anymore by itself.
Unluckily , HDDs are very high tech objects with very low price because of huge volume mass production. This means that many things are beyond pros too... imagine the end user.
Yes it is possible to get your data back, what is not possible - I speak for me - is to give you any info about how to do it more than what I told you , that doesn't fall into trade secrets.
If you can exclude the firmware problem or the media damage, you can be so lucky finding a head set that match and that can init the drive correctly and let you read the data (maybe slowly and with some error/retry) from the drive. But this is not science, it's luck.

[netw3rker]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this kind of sounds like a "chicken or the egg" problem. it sounds to me like you are saying "you need adaptives to configure the heads to read the data" but since the adaptives are essentially stored as data, how do you ever get a chance to read them?

I agree though that the "luck" part of this is finding a drive with heads that have an alignment that can read the adaptives written to the board though. I'm just curious if what could possibly happen is only *some* of the heads will line up. if thats the case, could it be possible to read only some of the data with each alignment match. that would make the 'luck' portion of this slightly less "lucky".

I'm not trying to get anyone to give up proprietary information, and in my mind the questions I'm asking should apply somewhat generically to all (or most) drives with multiple heads and funky alignment issues. If it doesn't apply then i'd love an explanation to help me understand why. this is something I'm using to help me learn about the technology in general, so a high level answer to the questions would be ok with me.

[BlackST]

At start drive use standard adaptives (ROM) to read just the necessary part of the FW to start. Then unique adaptives are loaded and ONLY THEN you can access user area.

[netw3rker]

Thanks BlackST,

excluding the actual use of the on board adaptives, If I find a donor drive that does have an alignment match that can read the FW/Adaptives, is it a safe assumption that the other heads will also have a reasonably matching alignment too?

Is it correct to assume that each heads alignment is relative to the head that reads the cyl/track info? If so I'm curious of how strong a possibility it is that only a couple of the donor heads on the MHA will actually have the correct alignment and as such prove useful, albeit not to fully initialize the drive.

Thanks again for all your help!
-Chris

[netw3rker]

PS: I'm still dumbfounded about the fact that with all the thought, proofreading, spell checking, editing, retyping and language barrier considerations I put in / do to all of my posts, I still managed to spell "quantum" "quantume" in the subject line