WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 Firmware Problems

[Commo]

Hello,
I am new here because I have a problem with my WD RED WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 hard drives and I hope you can help me solve the problem.

I have two identical hard drives of the same type. They work fine when I connect them directly to my mainboard via SATA. However, I want to connect them to a SAS HBA, but this does not seem to work. The SAS controller does not recognise the hard disks, and when they are connected to the SAS controller, the disks do not even spin up. They also don't spin up when connected via a USB SATA adapter, or when only a power cable is plugged in, without a data cable. I have tried everything, different mainboards, controllers, cables and power supplies. Nothing changes.

A third, similar but not identical drive, also WD30EFRX-68EUZN0, but slightly newer, works fine on said controller. As a test, I screwed the circuit board of the working disk to a "defective" disk. With the changed board, the hard drive spins up, but is recognised with 0GB capacity, as expected because the wrong EEPROM is on the board. So in the meantime I unsoldered the EEPROMs of both boards and exchanged them - the error travels with the EEPROM. The originally functioning hard disk shows exactly the same error pattern with the EEPROM of the non-spinning disk - no spinup. The formerly non-functioning disk spins up, but is displayed with 0GB, as expected, since the data in the EEPROM does not match the disk.

I concluded that there was a problem with the firmware or the data on the SPI EEPROM. I have read both ROMs with a CH341A programmer, but I am not getting anywhere. I would have to find a way to insert the board-specific data of the "defective" board into the "functioning firmware". Unfortunately, I don't know whether this is possible, and if so, how. I hope for your help here. The data on the hard disk are irrelevant, so they can be lost. What matters to me is to have functioning hard disks in the end.

I have attached the two ROM dumps to this post.

Thanks for your help in advance!

Regards

Lukas

Attachments

ROM_DUMPS.zip

(498.92 KiB) Downloaded 132 times

[fzabkar]

Your drives appear to be configured to Power Up In Standby (PUIS).

PUIS can be disabled with HDAT2:

https://www.hdat2.com/

You need to launch HDAT2 with the "/w" switch.

HDAT2 /w

[Commo]

That sounds easier than i expected haha. Do I understand it correctly, that I need to connect the drives via SATA, so that they work and spin up, and then run the tool under DOS? Does it need to be MS-DOS or will FreeDOS work?

[fzabkar]

A SATA connection and FreeDOS should work. It used to be that the SATA controller had to be configured for IDE compatibility mode in BIOS, but I haven't used HDAT2 for quite some time.

[Commo]

It worked! Way easier than I expected. Thank you so much!
I have another problematic drive, it's an SSD tho, I'll open up a new thread for this one in the flash section.

[fzabkar]

You can dump the ROM and the SA firmware modules using the demo version of WDMarvel:

https://wdmarvel.com/en/demo/

This is my WD ROM analysis tool:

http://users.on.net/~fzabkar/FreeBasic_W32/WD/wdROMv17.exe
http://users.on.net/~fzabkar/FreeBasic_W32/WD/wdROMv17.bas

If you compare your ROM dumps before and after disabling PUIS, you will find the location of the PUIS flag (and checksum).

HxD is a freeware hex editor:

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/