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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
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Seagate translator or ROM problem

January 16th, 2015, 8:43

Hi there folks,

This time I've got a Seagate ST3000DM001 reporting readiness status, but going BSY as soon as you try to get it identified or read any LBA. This first part was fixed disabling autorreallocation and its media cache which is known to be problematic. Now drive reads fast, until almost LBA 16M approx. After that point, no LBA is readable.

What I suspected: a translator problem. I saved resources, and performed a translator recovery with PC3K UDMA. At LBA 44M, it begins displaying an error message - "surface scanning error (instability)"; this happens for all LBAs starting at some specific point around LBA 44M. So I stopped the recovery process (not regeneration), and checked that I gained access to all LBAs up to around 44M.

Now, the thing is I can't go any further. The translator -fork- recovery process starts displaying that error at that point, and no matter where I continue the process, it reports the same problem. I found something suspicious trying to read Flash RAP and SAP files, which turned out to be impossible (doing the resources backup it reports an error when trying to read these 2 files from Flash, but strangely they are loaded into RAM somehow since the corresponding RAM files are readable. Also, in terminal:

Code:
F3 7> r1


and

Code:
F3 7> r2


stuck, but not

Code:
F3 7> r0


which is the CAP file.

Any ideas?

Re: Seagate translator or ROM problem

January 16th, 2015, 10:30

Bad translator.
Recovery for these drives is to be done manually, but the process is quite a PITA and usually requires enormous amount of time.
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