How to disable heads on WD Rom

[vakeiros]

Hi, i'm new arround here.
I've a WD5000KS that died past year, since then i've looking for another one to change pcb or Headset.
After a lot of search i dicovered there's a way to edit rom and disable heads 6-7 (the most probably damaged), but i have no idea how to do this!
i know for example that Acronis Disk Editor can do this, but only on disks that shows up on windows and mine just start spining, 3 clicks than sutdown :S

is there a way without spending hundreds of $ on it?

i have over 10000 pictures on it and LOTs of schools works in here!

please help if possible...

best regards

[vakeiros]

Hello from Portugal.
Why do you think that Acronis can do that ? What do you mean by "Died" ? Does the drive spin at all ? Does it click ? Why do you want to disable heads ?

ups, sry
when i said died, i wanted to specify it start spining, 3 clicks, shutdown

[Doomer]

1. If WD drive clicks and spins down that most likely indicates heads failure
2. Acronis cannot modify ROM on WD drives
3. Disabling heads 6 and 7 in ROM will not help you get your data
4. There is no free solution which guarantees you recovered data
5. If you mess with the drive you may easily put in a way that even a pro will not be able to recover data
6. To get data from your drive it is needed to make heads replacement (maybe several)
7. Please read this to understand comlexity of situation - diy-what-the-big-deal-t12671.html
8. If you still not afraid of doing it yourself and you understand that you can lose your data forever then here is info about heads replecement - http://hddguru.com/content/en/articles/ ... k-Q-and-A/
Please be adviced that reading this guide doesn't guarantee success of your acts and w/o skills chances of success are close to 0%
9. Please be also adiveced that you will not get step by step guide to fix your drive on this forum

Last edited by Doomer on July 13th, 2009, 21:30, edited 1 time in total.

[vakeiros]

Have you consider sending it to a data recovery house and ask the price of a data recovery on your drive ?
Those drives are very hard to do head swap and most likely you have bad heads or pre-amp and drive isn't reading firmware at all from platters and disable head 6-7 will not help you at all ....

thats what i gonna do...

[vakeiros]

by the way, wich recovery house? can you advise me one on lisbon area?