Head swap on WD Tahoe

[BytesBack]

Greetings,
I have a WD Tahoe drive, WD5000AAKS-00V1A0 that is having issues. It came in spinning down after clicking a few times. A head swap was performed. It mostly hung on BSY while spinning and took 5 tries to get kernel access but eventually did. It ID'd and allowed imaging, after I went to the head map and enabled only one head at a time. It was usable in DE but not outstanding, the drive only read in PIO for some of the surface on head 0 and had some large unread areas. When I switched to head 1 it worked in UDMA for a hundred million sectors or so, then hung in a big way.
I tried powering the drive back on but the drive stays BSY for a good 2 minutes before finally spinning down with ERR, much longer than the normal 15 seconds or so that I seem to see with these drives. I noticed in the log that it only showed 1 head in the head map on the drive, but there are definitely 2 physical heads. I rewrote the ROM I had backed up. It recognizes that there are two heads again, but the behavior is otherwise unchanged.
I can access it in Kernel mode, but I can no longer access the head map to disable the heads. Neither algorithm works. The old algorithm just displays a nonsensical error message of "S: 15" The new algorithm shows "RAM Range FFE00000 reading error Device Error Detected: VSCE Key must preceed data xfer request. No HDD RAM access, LDR upload is recommended."

Any idea what to try next if anything? I don't have another working donor to try a hot swap. I'm guessing the donor heads "went bad" but I don't want that to be the case since I don't have another donor and it conked out when it was working well.

Thanks,

Steve

[quasimodo]

"RAM Range FFE00000 reading error Device Error Detected: VSCE Key must preceed data xfer request. No HDD RAM access, LDR upload is recommended."

Well, did you try a loader?

[BytesBack]

Excellent question. Sorry I didn't mention, but yes, I tried to upload the 11.rpm I had saved from backup, but it errored out. The message was: "LDR Uploading error Device Error Detected: "SCT INVALID FUNCTION CODE""

If I try again, the part in quotes changes to "VSCE PERM OVL ALREADY LOADED"

[quasimodo]

pm sent

[northwind]

the part in quotes changes to "VSCE PERM OVL ALREADY LOADED"

Go ahead after that and proceed as if the LDR has been loaded successfully.