WD3201ABYS-01B9A0 freezing the whole bus on BS

[fayn]

Hi all,

I have had two of these drives in a mirror configuration. However, recently they decided to go pushing up the daisies -- to my bad luck, both at once

They are not completely dead, but all of a sudden they started to freeze (lock the whole bus) when reading (many, large) particular areas. I have managed to get the problematic areas reading, but only extremely slow. SA modules pass all checks so maybe just their content is not 100% ok, but I have no idea how to check.

BTW I have seen the same problem on a 500 GB -ABYS drive recently. Do these drives suffer from a specific failure?

Have you had experience with such a problem?

BR,

-fayn

[drc]

Sounds like bad heads or lots of bad sectors

[fayn]

Some more details:

The areas remain the same all the time; i.e. some can be read again and again, some never.

In all areas there are bad sectors, but only a few. If I read the areas sector by sector with cache off, they can be read almost completely (but it would take months to read all data!). On the other hand when I let the drive read more sectors at once or turn the cache on, the drive freezes immediately upon accessing the problematic area.

So I just guess the heads are not the source of the problem...

What seems really weird to me is the influence of the multi-sector and the cache settings Looks like a firmware bug

[poehere]

Stop playing around with this one. You can only make it worse for you and stop them reading all together on this. Clone them to two new good drives. Not sure if you have a DDI or a DE or even a DC on this one. If not your other option is SW to do this work.

Clone and go from there on this one. Other wise this can be done by a company DR that is in your area and if you do not damage more of the drives I should not think this would cost you a lot to have them cloned to new drives and checked for your file system on them. You might want to contact pcimage here Sean and see if he can do this one for you if you do not have the proper tools to handle this job and take care of the cloning on it.

[BlackST]

Check first if it is not SA related problem !

[fayn]

I did already. Checks passed, nothing even looks weird. Any idea what to check in particular

[BlackST]

With what tool ? (Atola, SD, PC3000) ?

[fayn]

Had it checked with PC3K (I don't have it).

[ppumkin]

I would suggest cloning your drives to images on a good hdd and use some software to mess about then.

Use dd-rescue in linux with reverse clone option and turn cache off like you did previously.

Monitor your HDD's while they are being cloned. If it hits a severe area of defects it can stall the entire process and cause more damage to your hdd's - you will then need to seek some body with pro equipment like the pc3k to use hardware control on errors. so it skips those bad areas and gets your data safe asap!

[BlackST]

If SA is fine and translator / lists are not trashed, try to clone possibly AFTER having SA data saved for each drive (just in case). Then see what happens during imaging and decide consequently / change strategy.

[fayn]

BlackST, ppumkin: That's exactly what I did Backed the SA of both drives up and tried to clone with cache off, sector by sector. However, the problem is that such copying would take months

Still the weird thing is that the copy runs fine, "just" slow... unless the cache is switched on or a multiple-sector read is done. Then the drive freezes completely with BSY on.

[BlackST]

I have an idea, let me see just one thing, then I'll pm.

[ppumkin]

You mentioned in the first post it was a mirror configuration? Do you mean duplicate identical data on both drives?
What does DE do?
Any way- sure BlackST will hint something to solve your case..

[fayn]

Yesterday I received one more drive with the same problem! Again ABYS!!! Is this a typical damage within these series?

This one could not wait so I had to give it to a local data recovery firm. Now comes the important part: They did the data recovery in one day -- without opening the drive! So the problem must be something simple (SA? PCB? ROM?); definitely not related to heads etc. Also, since the recovery rate was 100% even bad sectors were most likely not the source of the problem. I'm still interested (now even more!) what happens to these drives actually

P.S. Still nobody has had a similar case?

[BlackST]

I think it is a coincidence : I see many drives from same series because local wholesaler / distributor sell them - and the symptom /result can be common from many failures.

What is strange is the fact that the bus is frozen. Does it timeout even after a long time or is stuck frozen ? A soft reset is sufficient to make it work again or do you need to cut power ?

[fayn]

I've started believing there's some corruption to ROM

BlackST: The bus is completely frozen; nor soft reset helps. Still the weird thing is that reading w/o cache and just one sector at a time goes well... Just incredibly slow

[BlackST]

If it was heavy corruption on rom, wouldn't have started, this is sure.

[HarveyChong]

Maybe it's the issue of micro-jog.