Hi,
I am new here and don't have much experience with hard drives, but I am a computer engineer and have experience in hardware and firmware design and SMT soldering and repair... just not with hard drives specifically.
I have a Seagate SSHD that decided to fail on me one day without warning and from my research I am pretty sure its a bad NAND chip. The device does not spin up or show up in BIOS. The data is not critical, but being a computer engineer it is bothering me that I can not get this drive working and would like a nudge in the right direction if some of the experts here could help me out. I would like to recover the data if possible, and/or get this thing running again.
After some investigation and reading from this wonderful forum, I have been able to connect the drive to a serial port and get some information off of it, but can't make heads or tails of it other than "Error", lol... too much hard drive specific information that I do not have the experience with. Maybe someone can have a look and confirm if this is typically a NAND issue with these devices? I will include the serial dump in a reply post.
Also, I can not access the F3 Terminal prompt, but from reading this seems normal because firmware does not completely boot, is that correct?
I have found three separate threads on this forum which point to similar information, and I am wondering if someone can help with some clarification of the procedure for repairing this SSHD if it is indeed a NAND issue. I will be referencing this thread, as I found it most useful,
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php ... T1000LM014 1. First I would like to know if someone with experience with these drives can verify from the log attached below if this does appear to be an issue with the NAND and so the method referenced in the post above is likely to succeed.
2. Assuming 1 is correct, I was hoping someone could clarify the necessary steps, my understanding from researching several threads on this forum is it goes like this
A) Obtain Donor drive (unclear here if it is necessary to get whole drive or just PCB)
B) Secure Erase Donor drive (unclear if this step is necessary, and which option in seatools to use if it is)
C) Either swap ROM chip from patient to donor board or read ROM from patient and write it to donor ROM (unclear if both methods work, and if so what is advantage of one or other)
D) Swap Donor PCB into patient and boot with serial port connected (Should be able to get to F3 terminal now because donor NAND is not causing errors?)
E) Assuming having terminal access type '/o' (oh not zero) at F3 T> prompt to move into level O, then 'I' at level O prompt to initialize NAND cache
F) Grab a craft beer and celebrate.
3. Anyone in Canada, preferably Ontario, selling one of these drives I can use as a donor? See specs below, from some reading on the forum I was hoping maybe
@lcoughey might have one you would like to sell?
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