Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
January 7th, 2014, 12:09
Hello gurus,
I need some light to be shed on this case. Initially it seemed to be a simple TVS case. But the protection electronics didn't do their job and heads preamp got burnt (no visible damage, but drive wouldn't spin with HSA attached). With HSA dettached, it began to spin, and stopped afterwards before going full speed. Also, when opening the drive, the top surface was damaged like when the disk has been on a fire (it was like gasoline or brown-coloured), I suppose that was the preamp burning or getting very hot, although I can't see damage on the chip. Bottom surface was OK. I cleaned the top surface and it looks perfect now.
I couldn't find another DT01ABA100, so I tried with a DT01ACA100. Same physical aspect, same heads map, it seemed to be a good donor (correct me if I'm wrong). I swapped its only platter to the good one, and it spun up OK, seemed to callibrate, but PC3000 is giving ABR on any command, and I can't read SA directory. So no access to data.
This model does not seem to be supported by PC3K currently, and I don't know how to proceed on this case. From examining ROM I can see references to Hxx5C10xxDLE63x family, but PC3K supports only Hxx7210xxDLE6 or Hxx5C10xxCLA3 (among others). ROM and NV-RAM on this drives seem to be all shrinked to one single thing, and there's only one ROM-type chip on the board. Depending on the utility I choose to start with, I get a bad headmap when editing NV-RAM, or a bad or screwed S/N... but I don't know where to start with this drive - are heads OK? Sound good to me. Is NVRAM screwed up? When saving resources, I get 4 or 5 *.nvr files, instead of one. I'm afraid writing any of this binary files to the HDD would screw things up even more.
Any ideas on how to proceed? Current state is: All from donor except platter and ROM-type chip, drive spins but I can't read SA modules directory, and all commands return ABR ERR.
One more thing, attaching this drive through an external case to the computer gives a weird 2.45874 EB drive (or so) with a weird and screwed S/N.