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
|