Really weird case here. This is the first one of this particular model I've gotten in. It definitely has the symptoms of a bad head. The drive has a steady tick, but not the typical sound of a bad head in a Toshiba drive. In most cases Toshiba drives thrash around pretty good, but you can just barely hear this one. I hook it up to the imager, and it comes ready after a few seconds, but when you go to rescan the drives it doesn't show up and starts ticking again. No matter what I connect the drive to, DDI, PC3K, I can't read it. It will come ready, but it won't ID.

I had an exact match in stock, so I swapped the heads. Tried it, and it had the exact same symptom. Just to double check, I put the patient heads into the donor drive, and the donor drive worked perfectly, so it's not the heads.

I swapped the ROM on the PCB. I put the patient ROM on the donor PCB, and had the exact same symptoms. I put the donor ROM on the patient PCB and donor worked perfectly, so it's not the PCB.

So at this point, I've eliminated the heads and PCB as a possibility, since the donor drive works perfectly with the patient heads and PCB installed. I can't see that there would be any damage to the platter surface, because it would seem as though at least one of the original heads would have also been damaged, but they aren't.

The customer said she simply walked away from her laptop, the laptop went to sleep, and when she came back the screen was off and the drive was no longer recognized after that.

Did you clear the G-List?

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It won't read the SA.

If the heads are hovering over the outer circumference of the disk- likely to be the ticking noise you hear- then the SA is damaged. Negative prognosis.

That's what I'm afraid of. I hate to run these larger drives with the covers off, because it seems like it tends to disrupt the airflow and the heads will sometimes settle on the platter and squeal. If I can't come up with any solution though, I may take a look and see if that is what it is doing.

Removing cover is not normally a problem with Toshibas. You will see the problem immediately rather than waste more time guessing.

Tried it, and it did what I expected. The heads contacted the platter and squealed so I shut it off right away (I noticed it did the same thing on the donor drive as well). I know that with most Toshiba's they don't have a problem running with the cover off. It's not uncommon for us to image the smaller drives on our flow bench with the cover off, but I've noticed on some of them that are bigger than say 160GB or so, there seems to be an issue with the air flow and the heads contacting the platter. I definitely couldn't let it run long enough to tell what the heads were doing. I saw them move to the inside, and then to the middle, and by then I shut it off.