Help with Maxtor N40P Series

[jono-ats]

I have a couple of Maxtor 6E040L0 drives that are giving me fits. Both have the same symptom - they click and won't come ready.

I inspected one of them and saw no damage on the platter. I swapped heads by transplanting the platter to another good drive with the same codes. No change in symptoms.

While using safe mode, I can read drives' config info (1st screen after initialization). it reports correct capacity but only the generic model # and no S/N. The PC3000 utility reports "HDD structures have been read successfully" but then the drive times out with DRD, DSC, ERR, & ABT lights. I can't read firmware modules.

Hotswap doesn't seem to help. I've tried clearing G-Lists and SMART logs. No change.

Any other options / techniques that might help?

[beto]

Hello jono

can u post us the SA structure here?

Best Regards

Sinceraly

Alberto

[pepe]

Hi,

maybe the platter needs some alignment...

pepe

[jono-ats]

Hello jono

can u post us the SA structure here?

Best Regards

Sinceraly

Alberto

Sorry . . . I cannot read the SA structure.

[jono-ats]

Hi,

maybe the platter needs some alignment...

pepe

Interesting.

How do you align the platter?

Jon

[hddguy]

This is interesting....

[dobrevjetser]

I think pepe means the alignment of the center of the platter.
In a singleplatter drive there is not much else you can do, isn't it?

dobre

[hddguy]

Maybe thes olution is a platterswap. Did you check the filter to see if it is dirty? I have had many of these with platter damage it is not always easy to check.

[pepe]

Hi,

He has already done that, check the first post!
Yes, I meant centering.

pepe

[jono-ats]

OK, here are the results:

1st Maxtor: Bad motor bearing made it impossible to read data. Swapped platter into another unit. Recovered 99.9%

2nd Maxtor: Head crash on S/A area. No recovery.

3rd Maxtor: Some moron had taken out the platter and not only got fingerprints and scratches on it, but installed the platter upside down! Once I figured that out, I was able to clean surface and begin recovery. But there are a lot of bad sectors to deal with.

Pepe is right. You can rotate the platter's position relative to the hub and get different results sometimes . . . even with one platter and one hub!

Jono