Anyone know where the SA is located on this drive? The outer tracks or the inner tracks?

I have a drive that came in, and diagnosis has shown that the heads are bad (not a surprise with the clicking)

But what IS interesting the way that the heads (and for that matter, the media surface) became bad.

It seems as if somehow, the ramp is raised ~a milimeter above the media surface, this causing the head to park only ~half way off of the platter, and not in the right position (instead of loading on to the archway on the ramp is loads under it, where there is a plastic "wall" that stops the heads not all the way off of the platter surface. Not only does this cause load/unload damage to the heads, but it also wore the very outermost edge of the platter clear.

My impression on this is that as long as the SA is on the INNER tracks then technically you SHOULD be able to extract data, as long as you dont turn the drive on and off alot thus damaging the new heads too much. Obviously imaging from the inner tracks to the outer tracks would be the method of data extraction.


Does this sound possible?

and

Does anyone know where the SA on these drives are located?

It has to be in the middle according to SPT

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

ok, so the SA should be intact, in this case then, a head swap many solve this problem assuming the SA can be read, just image starting from inner tracks.

I had this same problem recently with a WD1200BEVS-xxRSTx... one of the little metal tabs on one of the heads missed the load ramp and got jammed up.

Customer elected not to recover so unfortunately I don't have an ending for that story

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

On that models WD1200 & WD1600 its a typical syntomph surely its from wd portable and was dropped by client the MR Sensors was damaged on the impact so the only way its MHA exchange but its difficult "the alignment " even if u did with Same DCM donnor, surely u hdd should be knocking but if u edit head map , and only left one head u reach DRDY DSC, strange, that´s happend´s to me

It is certainly knocking. Although I have heard the MHA alignment is not a very big deal on the scorpio drives, but only the desktop WD drives. If the customer gives the go ahead I am going to attempt to replace MHA, and see where it goes from there.

... or you can try it in the spare time just for experiment

Of course I want to look further into this in my spare time, but in a case like this it comes down to either the MHA replacement will work, or the drive is not recoverable anyways, so there is not much to lose.

I am one who is very against putting customer data at risk, but there are a small percentage of cases (like this) where the data is likely already lost, and there is really only one possible way to get data, and it is a gamble no matter who is performing the services.

In this case I feel it is good to first consult the customer (not on the technical details, because they likely dont care, or wont understand) and let them know the situation, and give them all of their options laid out for them.