Hi, first at all I want to introduce myself, I'm electronics teacher in France with no deep knowledge on hard drive.
I'm writing here in the hope that someone of you can help me with this hard drive.

well here it is, a friend of mine gave me his HDD, it wasn't spinning nor reconized in BIOS.

I didn't know how to start so i went for the hypothesis that the PCB was fried.
I found a donor PCB, swapped it, the drive spinned, was reconized in BIOS but no data were to be found.

Then I read at several places that i had to transfer the Flash memory W25Q80BW which I did and the result is the same as the begining: no spin, nothing.

Here you will find the content of the flash drive original (damien) and donor, I have no idea what is to be found in them and if it'is the cause of the malfunctionning.

Can someone here can point me toward a direction please?

the disk content is not of value, it's just a case for me to learn something.
Thanks
JM

The ROM is OK. I expect that the problem will be corruption in the NAND flash.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for your reply, when you say corruption you mean like our politicians are ?
Is there a way to correct the NAND?
I've searched the forum whithout finding a clear answer (to me..)
I can build a usb sata interface and i'm familiar with telnet and Putty
Thanks
JM

I think your model's UART port ("terminal") is locked, so the following procedure may not work:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35895

Another possibility:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=38853

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

But did you check obvious, TVS diodes, etc.?

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Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

+1 on the native PCB, not the donor.


No, but this is funny of course.

Yes, once we have the native PCB working correctly, or a compatible firmware revision donor PCB, with the NAND cache cleared out + ROM swap.

This is a hybrid drive, which is not so common, therefore not so commonly talked about.
Getting a terminal output using the original repaired PCB + native ROM would be best.

Not to discourage you, but it is a difficult case for you to solve without specialized knowledge and tools.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thank you all for your kind guidance.

So yes I did check the TVS diodes, "fuse resistors" and inductors prior to ask for tips here, everything looks and measures fine (the board itself looks like new), and since I have now a donnor board I compared aswell the transistors and some discretes components (board not powered).

So I did solder back the donor rom to the donor PCB and, as suggested here by fzabkar, I entend to do a secure erase with "hard disk wipe tool" which I found here on HDD guru, seatools doesn't seem able to do it to my disk.

When it's done i will solder the patient ROM onto the donor PCB and attach it to the patient drive, no matter the issue I'll post back my results here.

Thanks again everybody,
Cheers
JM

What message do you see in terminal? I suspect that the MCU may have a security key, in which case a donor ROM would produce a "digital signature verification" error.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

So, the wipe software took 2h with a succesful message.
I soldered then the patient rom onto the donnor pcb…and no matter i plug the drive directlly with the sata cable or the usb adapter, the drive doesn’t spin and it is not reconized in the bios/windows disks management /seatool…
Odd that if i use the donnor rom it spins …and reconized in bios , even in Windows disks management but showing donnor partitions.

Fzbakar, i have not tried yet to communicate thru terminal, that will be next step but I wonder why it doesn’t show up in bios nor spins??
I will come back soon …

"It doesn’t show up in bios nor spins" because it is throwing a "digital signature verification error" or is rejecting the corrupt NAND flash.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

That makes absolutely no sense to me.

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http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Hi,
Northwind you're right I messed up since a computeur came in with a dead hard drive which has the exact same pcb and firmware and i played around with it..I'd rather be more methodical and rigorous.

If you allow me I'll keep this post as a log to remind me and hoppefully share informations with the community.

So now I have the patient drive and two donnors:



so it seems that ST1000DX002 et ST1000DX001 share the same PCB (100731495 rev B) and here they have the CC41 firmware



here the 25Q80 flash memories content:

the patient (drive which i ignore the structure)


donnor1 the drive I wipped


and donnor two (drive with 3 partitions)


gurus here suggested me to repair the patient pcb, I have no schematics, I checked for the obvious devices pcb not plugged.
I picked a sata power harness yesterday and will come back with voltage measurement since I can compare boards and will update this post.
In the mean time I will source an adapter to access the pcb via serial port.
Have a nice day
JM

Hi,

I have a kind of similar situation.

It is about Seagate ST3500320AS disk with firmware SD04 not seen by the bios or windows all the time until it was not recognized at all.
The disk was spinning fine, no funny clicks or something. I presumed the PCB is dead. I got new PCB. I tried it without changing the bios and disk is recognized again only parameters are not correct.
Then with use of the ch341 programmator I swapped bios from original PCB to donor, everything went well. Now I have two PCBs that don't even spin up the disk. Then I've read somewhere that this ch342 programmator does not use correct voltage for signal, so I thought I've burned PCBs.
Then I got a new (second donor) PCB, check it with the disk without changing the bios and the disk spins fine. This time I've swapped the bios with soldering and again afterward the disk does not spin.
Now I am about to get another PCB.
Could somebody point me in the right direction, what I am doing wrong here?

I did save the data from this disk at the beginning of failing of the disk, but the problem is that the disk where data was saved to is dead - making scratching noise and I think it would be very hard to get anything from it. I have more chance to get data from original disk.

Thanks,
AJ

What you are likely doing wrong is diagnosis. Very likely.it is not a PCB problem..And this thread is about hybrid drives.
Your drive is an HDD.
Swapping PCBs straight up won't work because of compatibility.

What to do? Need to figure out if the info on the native ROM chip is still valid. If so, then we need a terminal output when powering the drive on, ideally with the native PCB + ROM..in the future, do this first before swapping anything.

What should you do? Send the drive, along with the native PCB and with the donor PCB that has the ROM on currently, to a data recovery expert. Obviously, it won't be low cost any longer.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

The original problem was not PCB related. There was most likely a simple fix via the terminal port, but that opportunity may now be gone.

Can you upload your ROM dump? (You should really start a new thread, as your model is completely different to the one in this thread.)

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

OK, I will start a new thread.

Thanks for help.