All,

Had a WD3200BEVT-75A23T0 come in yesterday. Drive was not spinning and was diagnosed as having a bad board. With a donor board (from an 80GB, but matching full board # and MCU chip), the drive would spin up and stay spinning. Patient board on the donor drive did not spin at all.

Performed a ROM swap and the donor board with patient ROM now spins up on the patient drive. But listening with a stethoscope there are no head seeking sounds and it spins down as soon as the drive goes ready (I do not even get a chance to ID the drive). I did notice that the RAM chip on the two boards doesn't match, but in the past it's widely been our experience that they typically don't need to so long as the PCB # and MCU do. Suggestions? Thanks in advance!

Dizi

Head swaps don't come much easier than on these, so my next step would be to do just that seeing that the drive is spinning down. You've matched PCB # and MCU so you're good to go on the PCB front.

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Nick,

Yeah, the WD laptops seem to be fairly easy/forgiving on headswaps from our experience. But how likely do you think it is heads? The problem we're in now is the client came to us in a rush scenario, but we don't have any donors for heads on this one, just a few boards. So we're hoping to exhaust all other options while we are waiting to find donors and them to arrive.

Dizi

Drive spinning up and heads do not calibrate, seems that maybe the contact between pcb and heads connector is not good.

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The contacts on the actual PCB are good, as we cleaned them just in case and they worked fine with the donor. Looks like a headswap is in order then (if we can acquire parts in a timely manner).

Thanks,

Dizi

I wouldn't change the headstack until it is proven to be the quasi-last resort , especially in this case.

If the customer is in a real rush scenario , you open the drive and then face other unpredictable problems, are you really sure they will accept it ? Up now, you just moved ROM.

Before you do anything else, check A) if the read channel is working, B) if ROM is OK C) Firmware D) driving of the VCM and so on. All this BEFORE you open the HDA.

With non native ROM spindle stays powered, and likely you have some level of SA access which does suggest the heads are functional. Agree with BlackST, do not change heads unless you are 100% sure. You state that 2.5" WD are very forgiving with head change, in some cases maybe so but if you diagnose it wrong and change heads unnecessarily it will only add more problems for you.

Dizi, I do not know what tools you have. If you had PC3K then I would imagine you would have been able to diagnose this yourself without posting it here in a very short amount of time.

I assumed you don't have the above, hence giving my opinion of what I would do if I didn't have the tool.

You said that the board was bad, you replaced that and now the drive spins down. Those symptoms, off the top of my head and if I didn't have PC3K or other similar diagnostic tool, would lead me to trying a known functioning head stack on the drive. The board was dead, perhaps it damaged the preamp of the HSA too. In the correct environment with the relevant experience I do not feel it's a huge risk, rather one step that will eliminate a lot of possible components, or solve the problem. When I was starting out I would sometimes swap heads when it turned out it was not required, and in my experience all it did was slightly delay the recovery whilst teaching me a lot about troubleshooting methodologies.

There are too many unknowns for me, and my suggestion seems to be incorrect according to others, I guess that's just my way of doing things.

Right or wrong, I wish you good luck, I'm sure you'll crack it.

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The PCB shouldn`t be expensive for the drive so it`s worth giving it a go.
Dizidago357.........Any tools such as PC3000 or salvation data are available?

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