Hello everybody,

We've a problem with the following HDD:

WD1600BEKT-66F3T2
P/N: 531291-001
Date: 27 OCT 2009
DCM: HBCTJHBB

This HDD has 2 platters and 4 heads.

We have to do HSA swap.
We've ordered 4 donors.

1.) Donor 1
Exactly the same HDD
WD1600BEKT-66F3T2
P/N: 531291-001
Date: 06 JUN 2010
DCM: HBCTJHBB

It's very strange because this HDD has only 1 platter and 2 heads. So, it's not possible to do a swap HSA.

2.) Donor 2
We bought a WD3200BEKT
WD3200BEKT-00F3T0
Date: 14 JUL 2009
DCM: EHNTJHBB

We've changed the HSA on the patient with this donor but the HDD don't inialize.

3.) Donor 3 and 4 is WD1600BEKT-00A2T0 (DCM: HHCTJHBB) and WD3200BEKT-22A25T1 (DCM: HHCVJHBB) but there are only one platter.

So, we have search information about the same model of our patient HDD and normally there are only 1 platter and 2 heads and we've 2 platters and 4 heads.

Do you think this is possible that the patient HDD use only 1 platter and that 2 heads are disabled ?
Have you had a same case in the past ?

Thank you in advance for your answer.

What tool do you use for diagnose and firmware work i.e. SD, Atola, PC3000 etc. ?

Actually, we use Atola Insight but we've ordered the SD HD Doctor suite.

I had this feeling...

You always need to check headmaps and overall compatibility between headstacks (based on DCM and hardware) FIRST either for patient (when possible) and donor , otherwise you need to do some work that don't know how to do (and even if it is possible) with AI or SD.

WD has a habit of putting different head/platter configurations in what would appear to be identical models. Unless you have a donor in stock you really have no way of inspecting its head map to see if it's a match. Unless your drive vendor has capability to give you this information (I don't know of any who do - or will) then you may have to rely on luck.

So, we can not just rely on DCM informations for WD.
The same HDD with the same DCM did not have the same number of heads, it's great.

Does anyone have a tip for this kind of problem?

This does not always ring true, but likely because the drives where manufactured 8months apart, WD made the change to a single platter configuration in this time.

If you can locate a drive with xxf3xx made ~Oct 09 (preferably Oct or earlier) you have much higher chances of matching head map.


At this time the Atola has no way of checking head map, but I believe this feature is being worked on, as it is, as seen here; important to have.

I've had some cases where head maps were wrong despite almost identical info on label. A disk of higher capacity usually does the job.

And we all thought it was just Fujitsu that made life difficult with this....

I shake my fist at fujitsu!


And yes, I have seen perfect matches (seemingly) with different head map