WD5000AAKS - stuck in PCB/safe mode whilst disk imaging

[cheadledatarecovery]

A WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 came in, nothing drastically faulty with it at first glance:

Disk initialized OK, firmware & ROM OK, reading LBA values OK. The one note worthy thing was that when the disk was powered by one of my 12V power sources (the least stable source notably) it would not initialize and would spin up & down as per a head fault on this series of disk, but on the other two 12V sources it was fine.

The disk was put on an imager, & was configured & head map taken. Initial tests showed no individual head was weak. It was reading at full speed at about 42MB/s, no errors. Then at about sector 2800000 (about 2 minutes into cloning) the disk powered down. It would not spin up again.

I checked the components on the PCB with a multimeter & cleaned the area where it attached to the HDA. It did not make a difference. I then reconnected the HDD to the diagnostic equipment to find the disk was stuck in PCB/safe mode, as if 3 jumpers were attached to the pins near the SATA connector. I've not established why this has come about, or how to rectify it. It is not important in data recovery terms, as I have a suitable donor PCB and have rewritten the saved ROM to it and the disk is now imaging flawlessly with no unreadable areas.

The owner of this disk did not originally give a detailed description of how the disk was malfunctioning, so it is hard to know if he was experiencing issues associated with a bad PCB, or whether there were unreadable sectors which the disk imager is presently mediating or moderating. Has anyone had a similar problem? Once the disk is fully imaged and the data is stored safely I will examine the faulty PCB & HDA a bit more thoroughly and report if I find anything.

All the best,
John

[labtech]

Notorious Tornado pcb failure.

[Cleanroom]

yup

faulty board

get a matching board and transfer rom

[cheadledatarecovery]

Yes I'm used to receiving this series of disk where by one sector is readable at a time, then the disk spins down. I've not seen this variation, where the PCB has entered safe mode, particularly when the disk was running OK for a few minutes. I'm just glad I took a copy of the firmware & ROM straight off and had a good donor in stock. The imaging has finished now, no errors, so I expect the owner was probably struggling with the PCB issues also. When I get chance next week I'll see if I can the PCB out of safe mode to initialize the disk again.

John