Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9: Head Matching Advice Request

[MadMex]

Hello All,

Let me try this again without the quasi-fictional narrative that was induced by sleep pharmaceuticals...

I have a 160gb Maxtor DM Plus 9 with the Calypso board.

YAR41BW0
N,M,G,A
6Y160P0042811

I have followed the advice posted earlier (by Pepe, I believe) about using the multimeter in diode mode to test for shorts and have determined that yes, the pre-amp is shot. This also explains why a hot-swap was a very bad idea since I now have a client drive and a corpse.

Armed with the knowledge that bad pre-amps kill PCBs, I did a head and PCB swap, only to find out that this wasn't going to work either because although the donor matched the 6Y and 28 in the model type, the 4 letters of the donor were "K,M,B,D" and not "N,M,G,A".

Some additional research shows that I have not matched the heads correctly, and the donor head/pcb combo worked fine when I put it back in the donor, which seems to confirm this theory since I can't seem to find anything that tells me that there is any drive specific adaptive information that needs to be copied or soldered onto the donor PCB for it to work.

I can't seem to find definite information as to what I need to match in order to get the correct heads. So far I have found conflicting information from "the letters don't matter" to "match the first and last" and also "match all 4".

Looking at the donor while attached to the Maxtor SD unit, I can see that it shows that the head type for the donor is "K" which is the first letter of the donor's 4 letter code. I don't know if this is why the first letter is K or if it is just a coincidence.

I can also tell that the pre-amp chips are different. The patient is Texas Instruments while the donor is some no-name chip.

I read some posts here that hinted at the fact that matching these drives was a pain.. And I'm starting to agree. Do the letters correspond to head type, platter type/material, pre-amp chip used and um, well, something else?

If I were to find a drive that matched all 4 letters, would I also need to worry about matching the PCB numbers as well, or do I not have to worry about that because I have other PCBs that do match the 6Y/28 numbers of the patient PCB. Can I mix and match them like that?

Any help demystifying this for me would be very appreciated...

[jono-ats]

I try to match the 1st 2 characters of the config code, i.e. N,M. Someone reported success with one drive by just matching the 1st character, and the drives were 3 years apart in manufacture!

Note that head maps may vary on these drives, so you want to be sure to match them too.

[MadMex]

Thanks for the advice Jono-ats,

I'm still having a helluva time finding a donor. I'm starting to think the N,M,G,A drives were manufactured by Maxtor for some kind of OEM/External case application and that's why the internal/retail K,M,C,D variants are so plentiful and this is like hunting for a white whale. Any drives that WERE in external cases and still work are likely still inside those cases. And drives that failed are likely long since scrapped.

Patience.. Data recovery's second best weapon in their arsenal.. (knowledge is #1).

_MM_

[jono-ats]

Closest thing I've got is:

YAR41BW0
N,M,B,D
6Y120P0 . . . . .


You can also look for 200 GB drives.