WD Caviar model WD400BB-00DKA0 - repair recommendations

[Eugene2008]

Hello,
I need help to repair a WD400, 40GB drive - only repair, no data recovery.

The drive is detected as defective by the PC BIOS (SMART), which warns about an iminent failure.
In the recent period before and after the BIOS failure detection, the drive worked slow and the HDD LED blinked most of the time continously.

I tried to format and reinstall Windows, but the time to format a 10GB partition was about 2 hours! After this Windows booted OK and run slowly, but I still got the BIOS warning at startup.
I tried to put the drive in another PC, but the BIOS warning remains and it works slowly.

If you want to help me, please share your ideas. I have electronics knowledge so i can do measuring, soldering and that kind of work.

Thanks

[CK]

Not sure why you'd want to repair a 40GB drive? Personally I'd scrap it and buy a nice shiny new one!

It could be failing for any number of reasons, bad media, degrading heads, g-list, SMART errors, etc etc

If you have nothing better to do, load up MHDD and run it thru and see what happens....

You need to let it run and you'll have some more info that you can use to troubleshoot. Chances are it is full of bad sectors. If so, scrap it and move on....it's not worth the hastle.

[Eugene2008]

Thanks for the reply.
I want to repair the drive because of "curiosity", and if I succeed, it would be good for playing with FreeBSD Unix on an old PC

I scaned it twice with MHDD: first with default options, and the second time with scan+ERASE delays option.
First I got very good results: scan time 30min, brown blocks: 53, green blocks: 240, the majority being fast access blocks. After this scan the SMART error disapeared.
Second time, the results were very bad, almost all blocks brown and a very slow scan, I stoped it at 1%.

What could be the cause for this variable behaviour?

[rchadwick]

A bad hard drive?

Some HD failures can be fixed with a reasonable amount of success. This doesn't sound like one of those. Dying heads/preamp perhaps?

[Eugene2008]

I tend to believe it's cause by overheating. I re-scaned and now the bad blocks (brown) disapeared .

This is the SMART log:

Code:

[PRE]HDD: WDC WD400BB-00DKA0; FW: 77.07W77; SN: WD-WCAHM1169528

--------------------------------------------------------

            Name                        Val Worst Raw

Att #   1 : Read error rate           : 200    1  1728 

Att #   3 : Spin up time              :  91   88  1958 

Att #   4 : Number of spin-up times   :  98   98  2018 

Att #   5 : Reallocated sectors count : 200  200  0 

Att #   7 : Seek error rate           : 200  200  0 

Att #   9 : Power-on time             :  88   88  8881 

Att #  10 : Spin-up retries           : 100  100  0 

Att #  11 : Calibration retries       : 100  100  0 

Att #  12 : Start/stop count          :  99   99  1983 

Att # 194 : HDA Temperature           : 113  253  30 

Att # 196 : Reallocate event count    : 200  200  0 

Att # 197 : Current pending sectors   : 200  200  0 

Att # 198 : Offline scan UNC sectors  : 200  200  0 

Att # 199 : Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate  : 200  200  0 

Att # 200 : Write error rate          : 199   85  59 

[/PRE]

[Eugene2008]

After about 10min of scaning, the bad blocks reapeared in other locations, I think because the temperature increased to 48.

[rchadwick]

A healthy drive should be able to handle 48 degrees without any short-term issue whatsoever. If you really want to 'fix' the drive, buy a small refrigerator, get a long IDE cable, and mount the drive inside. That way, you can keep the drive cool enough that it will hopefully work. I'm joking obviously, but what scares me is that someone would actually do something like this, for a 40GB drive no less. Would that be you?

I imagine it would be very frustrating playing with Unux on a bad HD. When you have problems, you might not know if you're doing something wrong in Uinux, or if you've got corrupted data from a bad HD. Man, you must really like pain.

Probably bad heads or Preamp. That's why you're getting bad blocks in different locations. They're not really bad, just being read that way. Also, electronics sometimes fails in a manner where it's temperature sensitive. If you insist on playing, replace the head stack. Either way, it will fix the problem.

[jono-ats]

Rchadwick: Don't forget to add the need to align the top cover if you change the head stack . . . another P.I.T.A. aspect of working with this series.

Jon

[Eugene2008]

Thanks for the replyies.

When I started the topic i thought it was something simple related to electronics, like a blown capacitor. I removed the board and it looks brand new, with all components in good condition. I am not going to change anything mechanical like heads - because I don't have experience and "clean room", and I can't get proper heads, etc.

So this HDD it's lost now, hope to find a cool use for the parts, beside the neodim magnets.

Thanks!

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

Hello,

I Am Not sure Whay All Of My Fellow Friends Are So Pessimistic .First Do This

Buy a Tool Like ACE PC3000 UDMa or The Salvation Data WDC Tool ,then Try To disable the Head That is Weak,then Try The Same It will Be Fun Experimenting Learning And shelling Money .