hi All

i have the above drive that clicks, spins up, spins down and keeps on doing the same, drive will not become ready and nothign can be access of it.

i have an identical donor same DCM, same model, family and all matches.

i tried a board swap and the donor board behaves exactly like the patient board when installed on patient hda.

when installing patient board to donor hda, drive does not become ready but does not click.

i have 2 questions

is there an alignment issue with these drives also when you open the lid and move the head ?

does this drive use a parking ramp of the platters or are the heads parked on the platters.

thank you for any info you casn provide

While I ,myself, hate the "send it to a pro" approach of many on this forum, mindlessly trying things is not going to magically fix the disk. You need to diagnose the problem, then fix it, and "clicking and not becoming ready" is not a diagnosis, it's a mere symptom. This is like trying to fix a brain tumor with Alkazeltser just because a headache is a symptom of a hungover.

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

thank you for the replies.

i have determined it is most likely a head issue and know i am not going to finsd info here about head alignment, i am just trying to determine of this drive does have alignemtn issues or is the head mounted differently.

i guess it is best to open and have a look.

thx

Looks like they park on the surface. Have not personally had one of these open yet.

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

hi drccsc

thx for reply will keep you posted for future use.

thx

As has been pointed out, there is no ramp.

The cover must be installed before powering up the drive.

Assuming that you tried a hot swap to eliminate the possibility of a firmware problem, then:

On the PC3000, try cutting all but head 0 & 1 on the heads map, and see if the clicking stops. Then just try head 0. If the symptoms don't change, chances are you have a bad head / preamp.

I have done head swaps on these and the post-swap alignment wasn't too bad. In at least one case, I had to tinker with the alignment to get it going; another that I recall just worked without any extra steps.

Beware of the bottom magnet. It is held to the chassis with adhesive and takes a fair amount of (careful) force to remove. It is also unusually strong.

I'd say these are easier to do head swaps than a lot of other WDs, at least in my own experience.

Jon

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

Hi Jono Ats
thx for the answers,

an identical board from identical donor still did not work, in thepast when i have done WD drives and i relaced the board the drive at least spins up normally,it does does not ID till i didnt do the U12 chip move.
in my case the drive still clicks and spins down and never gets ready, even setting jumpers into kernel mode and launchng with kernel mode does not give me the ability to modify the head map, i thought that with the jumpers set i should be able to get the drive to let me read rom to modify head swap but no such luck.

will keep you posted.

thx for answers

hi i have an update and am a bit stuck here so any answers greatly appreciated,

i did a head swap on the above drive.
prior to head swap drive would not become ready and wuld always click loudly.

after head swap the drive spins up, speed stablizes, clicks softly about 10 times, slows dows, spins up and clicks about 10 more times at which strage the drive becomes ready and stops spinning.

drive will not autodetect so i select manually and launch utility and get the following

WD Techo ON Error Device Error Detected 51/04 (ABR)

along with Err and ABR lights.

if i try and enter the drive not kernel mode the same thing happens

i am assuming that the heads were faulty as at least the drive is becoming ready now, i also tried the patient board on the drive and the drive behaves exactly as above.

any help will be really appreciated, i am mabye suspecting alignment problems now.

do alignent issues show up as above ?

thank you in advance