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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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WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 7th, 2025, 9:43

Hello everyone :)

I'm new to this forum, I spend so much time on this case.
My old personal HDD have burned PCB (SMOOTH chip) and was in state of making clicking sounds and was not rezognized in the system or BIOS.

I will describe my situation what I have done best as I can:
I was able to find a donor very close to manufacture date of pacient. I extracted ROM.bin file from pacient using CH341a programmer and programmed it to donor PCB U12 chip (8pin).
The drive spins okay after PCB and ROM swap, but there was again clicking sounds from HDD and was still not rezognized in the system or BIOS.
So I decided to replace the heads from donor to pacient. This was the hardest part for me (I created small lab environment for this).
After this procedure my HDD is recognized in OS! and I used WDmarvel to dump the ROM and SA modules. After reading forums info from user fzabkar.
But when I try to use ddrescue to image the drive, it is very slow, ddrescue says it may take a month or more to image the drive.
Do I need to rebuild the ROM or SA on the drive? I really don't know what to do next.

Pacient:
WD800JD-08LSA0
Date: 27 OCT 2005
SN: WMAM9F765651
Size: 80 GB
DCM: DSBANTJCH
PCB: 2060-701335-003 REV B
PCB sticker: 2061-701335-A00 AH

Donor:
WD800JD-22LSA0
Date: 15 NOV 2005
SN: WMAM9H745268
Size: 80 GB
DCM: HSBHNTJCA
PCB: 2060-701335-003 REV B
PCB sticker: 2061-701335-A00 AH
Attachments
Export.zip
exported from WDmarvel demo
(931.37 KiB) Downloaded 9 times

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 17th, 2025, 7:44

Hello and welcome to the forum,

If you've been able to transfer original ROM to a donor pcb, you should have a fully working pcb now, in theory.
No need to rebuild the ROM.

ROM rebuild is required, if your original pcb is toast to the state it's not possible to read anything from it.
But this is not your case.

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 17th, 2025, 18:37

your original issue might have been related to a defective via in the feedback path of the -5V supply of the preamp (this pcb was prone to develop such problem). As a result, this supply voltage elevated to harmful levels. At about -8V hdd began clicking but no further damage occurred. Often the FB path got completely broken, which resulted in about -25V on the -5V line. Now this was definitely harmful, usually killed the preamp but somewhere in the middle it began overwriting the data in an uncontrolled way, so user data, servo data both got seriously corrupted, sometimes beyond recovery.
If your drive still reads albeit slow, it might be hit by some amount of corruption, not sure if you would notice defective sectors are slowing down the process... Never used ddrescue, does it log problems to screen or file ?

pepe

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 17th, 2025, 19:09

pepe wrote:so user data, servo data both got seriously corrupted, sometimes beyond recovery.

Every SA module has a checksum of 0x00. Isn't it more likely that the patient's head adaptives are not close enough to the donor's, and would a transfer of adaptives from donor ROM to patient ROM be something worth trying?

BTW, is this one of those models where the head screw affects the alignment?

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 18th, 2025, 5:02

My old personal HDD have burned PCB (SMOOTH chip) and was in state of making clicking sounds and was not rezognized in the system or BIOS.

this was a bit self-contradicting, if SMOOTH is burnt, hdd hardly ever spins up. I would say never. So i suppose it wasn't actually burnt, more likely the above described issue occured.
the corruption occurs without fw interaction coz of constant write due to preamp damage or malfunction. So CS never occurs in this process.
Since drive is clicking between park area and approximately the middle of the platter, mainly the 2nd half of the user area is affected usually.

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 19th, 2025, 4:13

fzabkar wrote:
BTW, is this one of those models where the head screw affects the alignment?

yes.

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 21st, 2025, 7:19

Currently using HDDSuperClone and 48.1GB of data rescued, but the drive has too many bad sectors. Drive has 2785 power cycles and >12799 hours
I have attached images of the burned SMOOTH chip of pacient PCB and original head from pacient, it seems that it has no screw for adjustment or I'm wrong? It just slides off when dissasembly.
When there are good sectors average read speed is ~55 MB/sec, bad sectors skipping or slow read speed ~10 KB/sec

I will let it run day or two and I hope it will complete
Attachments
hdd.png
pacient_head.png
pacient_pcb.png

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 21st, 2025, 7:51

hey, was it spinning and clicking with that smooth??

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 21st, 2025, 7:53

pepe wrote:hey, was it spinning and clicking with that smooth??

Hi, yes it was

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 21st, 2025, 15:36

It looks like the drive took a hit on the 12V side. That's where the spindle motor and VCM MOSFETs are powered from.

Do you have a dump of the donor ROM?

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 23rd, 2025, 6:09

fzabkar wrote:It looks like the drive took a hit on the 12V side. That's where the spindle motor and VCM MOSFETs are powered from.

Do you have a dump of the donor ROM?


Yes, I have attached the bin of donor ROM as zip file because forum will not allow me to upload bin directly.
Attachments
donor_original.zip
(126.3 KiB) Downloaded 12 times

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 23rd, 2025, 12:45

I have patched the donor's ROM resident module 0x47 into the patient ROM. You could try to supplement your recovery with this modified ROM. Hopefully those bad sectors will now be readable.
Attachments
Patient_with_donor_47.7z
(126.77 KiB) Downloaded 10 times

Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging

November 26th, 2025, 10:24

Thank you fzabkar, it looks like it can read the bad sectors now! I managed to rescue all important data from the drive, so I call it success. Thank you everyone!
Have a nice day :D
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