Hello all,

I'm trying to confirm how much of a match my Donor drive is to the Patient for head swapping.
Patient is clicking twice and spinning down and board swap isn't enough.

1st 4 of the SN, Full Part#, Firmware, Board Rev, Site code match but Date Code is over a year old.
Still hunting for something closer, but in the meantime wanted to check.

I'm using an SPI Flash programmer to read and program the firmware rather than physically swapping the chips.
I tried going through the serial debug port but get the 'Diagnostic Port Locked' message.
I don't have access to any of the rather expensive tools the professionals are using.

Is there particular information/location I would for in a HEX/ASCII dump of the firmware?
I've attached both Donor and Patient here.

Thanks!

The preamp type is in the SAP module of the ROM. You can parse the ROM and extract its components with F3RomExplorer:

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=2534

Locating the Preamp ID in a Seagate F3 ROM:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=3008

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for the help!

Looking at the "Locating the Preamp ID in a Seagate F3 ROM" link doesn't seem to help me though.
Your doing a Ctrl-L in terminal and getting "PreampType: 84 30" and then searching in the SAPM module for it.

I can get to the serial debug port but I don't have the tools to unlock it.
I'm assuming location in the SAPM module is going to be different for each firmware revision.

I am also a little more confused on the example as the result found is 31 84 but the Ctl-L is showing 30?

Thanks again for the help, much appreciated.

The first byte is the important one. The second byte doesn't need to match, AFAIK. Also, sometimes the byte order is little endian rather than big endian.

This thread has examples for several models:

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=2173&p=21992#p21992

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

The preamp ID for both ROMs is B7 04.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

So for this Seagate series look for "AD DE CE FF" as the signature and 1st 2 bytes before that is the preamp.

Thanks again for the help!