It's been one of those weeks. I have another thread going here about a 40gb Hitachi, well today I got in a WD2000JB drive that was having problems. The drive was stuck in like a BSY state, and sometimes it would eventually click once and spin down. It was definitely an odd problem for a WD drive in my experience. I couldn't gain access to the SA of the drive no matter what I did. The closest I got was shorting across point E19 and E26, which caused the drive to click for a minute as expected, but once it stopped and came ready after a minute or so I was able to enter the utility. It errored on Copy 0 and 1 of the modules and the head test also failed.

I guess my weakness is diagnosing these drives properly, but I've never had an issue like this crop up before. Logically to me it appeared to be an issue within the electronics or the heads, but I was leaning towards the heads just being weak. I went ahead and swapped the PCB first. I had the exact same result afterward, but the patient PCB worked on the donor drive, so I know it wasn't a PCB problem. I always try PCB's first with WD drives, even if it is showing a head problem, just to be sure. I swapped the heads, and then when the drive powers on you hear the heads rattle rapidly for about 2 seconds and it becomes ready. However, the drive still won't ID in the utility. I spent quite a bit of time working on head alignment after that, but the symptom never changed. In these drives I've become pretty proficient at aligning heads so I was pretty sure something else was going on.

I put the patient heads in the donor drive just to see what would happen. Powered it up, and surprisingly it acted as though the alignment was off. So I adjusted it and tried it 7 or 8 more times until it hit and the drive came ready. The donor drive worked flawlessly. So now the donor drive functions perfectly, no read errors or anything with the patient heads and pcb (with it's native ROM of course). I guess it has to be a firmware problem? Maybe I should have tried to hotswap first, but I've never had much luck with that.

Any thoughts on this? Please feel free to PM if you prefer. Thanks.

Firmware / alignment / servo / speed but not necessarily in that order.

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