I have an 80GB WD drive that came in clicking. This is a black top wd800jb-00jjc0. In many of these cases I have found that the clicking is due to an issue with the firmware or the PCB. I swapped the ROM over to a good working board, but the same symptoms. I put that board onto a parts drive board just to check the modules and they all looked good. I put a parts drive board onto the customer's drive, and the exact same clicking is heard no matter what is done.

I don't have a digital oscilloscope, so I have no way of checking the read channel. I'm motivated to actually buy one now however. I had a good parts drive, exact same model, just a slight difference in the DCM

Customer Drive DCM: HSBHNTJCA
Parts Drive DCM: DSCHNTJCH

Both drives were made in Malaysia and were manufactured about one month apart.

This is a single platter, two-head drive, so swapping the heads was pretty easy. When I finished the swap, the drive still clicked, but I did notice a difference in the way the drive clicked.

Prior to the head swap it would basically click in the following rhythm:
click click.....click click click......click click.....click click click......click and then spin down

After the head swap it has this rhythm:

click...click...click spin down

I put the heads from the customer's drive into the parts drive. Now the parts drive clicks exactly the same rhythm as the customer's drive did prior to the swap:
click click.....click click click......click click.....click click click......click and then spin down

So changing the heads did make a difference, but only in the way it clicks, however the parts drive has the exact same symptoms as the customer's drive did when those heads are put inside it.

Is there typically a difference in the way a drive clicks if there is an alignment issue? If you would rather communicate via PM that would be fine, but I'm sure I can't be the only one with this kind of problem on these drives.

Thanks

maybe you should have diagnosed which head had failed before swapping them. You could have got a little data off.

That was an option I looked at, since it has worked well on other drives, but the customer has large database files on here. There are no small files needed that may have been recoverable with one of the heads deactivated.

you dont know how the data was written. You never know.

Must have been a compatibility issue. I found another drive that was manufactured on the exact same date, and the DCM was only 1 letter off:

Customer Drive DCM: HSBHNTJCA
Parts Drive DCM: HSBHNTJCA

The drive imaged all the way through except for about 60 sectors. Afterwords, just to experiment a bit, I loosened the cover, shifted it around, and tried to put it into different positions, but it didn't change anything. The drive still calibrated each time and was readable.

Just a thought: if it was just compatibility issue, why the donor heads didn't work after placing them back into the donor...
There should have been something else too.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I didn't put the donor heads back in the donor. I put the customer's heads in the donor.