Drive came in after being dropped. It's a ST1500LM003. Prior to being dropped customer reported that the drive had been acting up, and not able to view certain files. I believe the customer may have lost his temper and hit the drive, but that's just a guess. The heads were stuck to the platters, and you could see head 5 was skewed a bit, so it didn't look good for the heads. Got them parked, and just did a quick power up to see if they would work, and they started clicking right away. I shut it down immediately. I thought it would be wise given the situation to go ahead and swap out the heads. Head swap went fine, the drive powered up and was actually able to image flawlessly about 60% through. Beyond this nothing else can be read. I've seen a couple of cases that were slightly similar to this and it ended up being a translator issue. I don't believe there is any damage to the platter surface causing this, because this area that can't be read is actually beyond the region where the heads landed when the drive was dropped.
This is the output I get in terminal when the drive is powered up...and I can gain access to the command prompt. I'm not for sure what the FAIL codes are that I'm seeing here:
- Code:
Rst 0x10M
RW: Disc Ctlr Initialization Completed.
FAIL Op=0900 Resp=0005
FAIL Op=0600 Resp=0005
(P) SATA Reset
ASCII Diag mode
F3 T>
I've worked with mostly 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives. I am however, completely fresh when it comes to freeplay drives, and I don't know if the commands are the same, and I don't want to just go punching in commands that may screw things up. Being that I'm unsure what the FAIL statements represent in these drives, I would just be guessing on everything, which I don't want to do. I know the drive is nearly full, so I would like to try and get the remaining 40% for my customer if at all possible. In other cases, I have just cleared smart and regenerated the translator and it worked.
Any input would be appreciated. Feel free to PM if you prefer. I feel like I got the hardest part done, which was getting the heads swapped out and the drive mostly imaged. Just trying to get over this last hump. Also, I do everything through terminal, not PC3K. Just wanted to clarify.
Thanks.