WD2000BB head alignment

[jono-ats]

This particular family / model is sometimes tricky even for those of us who have tools like the PC3000 and know how to achieve re-alignment.

Matching heads and adaptives;

I read Ace's docs but could find no mention of adaptives in the Caviar range. There doesn't seem to be any menu item for this purpose, either. The only "adaptive" items are the head map and firmware version. The module that I referred to earlier is not mentioned. Have I misinterpreted those 6 sets of numbers, or are they irrelevant, or did Ace neglect to analyse them?

I haven't worked with this family in a long time, but IIRC Ace's documentation on these is pretty sparse (e.g. compared to Royal). On head swaps I always try to match head / slider info in ROM.

[pepe]

These are though for MHA swap, i can do it if you can outsource... let me know.

pepe

[fzabkar]

These are though for MHA swap,...

If I understand you correctly, the proper procedure when swapping heads is to patch the donor's head adaptives into the patient's ROM. Since nobody other than you seems to be aware of this, and since this feature is absent from PC3K, it would appear that people have been struggling with two problems at the same time. That is, they would have started with the fundamental alignment problem which affects even the patient's headstack, but then they would have complicated the procedure by not accounting for the donor's HSA adaptives.

[pepe]

everybody could do it if it was that simple.

pepe

[fzabkar]

everybody could do it if it was that simple.

pepe

I didn't say it was simple, I was merely suggesting that a failure to account for adaptives might introduce additional difficulty.

[Hil_76]

Hi.

Recently, I have developed a method to recover data from old WD models that have a problem with the heads and the lid alignment.
Sample families: Mammoth (ex. WD800BB), Sabre (ex. WD800JD), Raider (ex. WD3200KS), and other similar.
Until now, recovery was about finding the right donor and a bit of luck. In this solution it does not matter the date of production, microjogs, etc. on donor drive.
Now this is rare model, but if someone has problem with important case, please PM me (this is a commercial service in laboratory in Poland).