Hello everyone,

I had a WD5000AAVS which was dropped while working and at least 1 head was physically damaged.
Disk was not detected from BIOS.
I found a WD5000AAVS donor drive with matching 5th and 6th DCM characters and did the head replacement with confidence and no accidents but now the heads once powered up and disks start spining, they unload from the parking bay, slide almost to the center of the disk and slide back out to the parking bay without stopping somewhere to read. This happens 3 times and then disks stop to spin. Disk is again non-detectable in BIOS.

Any ideas?

Well it goes to the centre because the SA is there. Its common on 3.5" - but it cant read it so it resets and tries again. Maybe you have SA damage.

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Yes, media damage or the other helluva of problems related to these "puppies" (WD). Check if heads still work on DONOR. If not...

Donor's heads work fine back on donor (donor is not a faulty drive).
Anything else non-dead end I could check apart from the SA?

Nothing.

how do you know how heads are acting? I take it you have viewing it with lid removed? I hope you put the HSA screw back in while doing this.....

Yes. Try various adjustments to the torque of the cover screw that connects to the headstack. Coupled with the fact that donor heads often have slightly different alignment than the originals, this can be a time consuming adjustment process.

Be careful when adjusting the torque of the head screw, not enough and you could severely damage the heads and platters.

Not quite as much as not having it in.

Lol, could be worth a try!

thanks guys
will try that and also see what MHDD is saying

Disagree.
This is not "common" on 3.5" drives.
only *some* model have SA in the middle, but not WD.

Janos

This drive needs special equipment to do the HSA/MHA replace.
Not all the recovery companies can do that.

If you are interested, i can help, before you will ruin the surface with useless attempts....

Janos

Sounds to me like heads are not a close enough match. In my experience, cover position in this family really isn't critical. If you know what to look for, you can match heads on the first try in most cases.

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it should be enough for match.

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If you have UDMA, disable all but H2 (physical H0) and see what happens.

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