MultiDrive – free backup, clone & wipe disk utility from Atola Technology

All times are UTC - 5 hours [ DST ]




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 13 posts ] 
Author Message
 Post subject: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 7th, 2025, 9:43 
Offline

Joined: November 7th, 2025, 6:15
Posts: 5
Location: Slovakia
Hello everyone :)

I'm new to this forum, I spend so much time on this case.
My old personal HDD have burned PCB (SMOOTH chip) and was in state of making clicking sounds and was not rezognized in the system or BIOS.

I will describe my situation what I have done best as I can:
I was able to find a donor very close to manufacture date of pacient. I extracted ROM.bin file from pacient using CH341a programmer and programmed it to donor PCB U12 chip (8pin).
The drive spins okay after PCB and ROM swap, but there was again clicking sounds from HDD and was still not rezognized in the system or BIOS.
So I decided to replace the heads from donor to pacient. This was the hardest part for me (I created small lab environment for this).
After this procedure my HDD is recognized in OS! and I used WDmarvel to dump the ROM and SA modules. After reading forums info from user fzabkar.
But when I try to use ddrescue to image the drive, it is very slow, ddrescue says it may take a month or more to image the drive.
Do I need to rebuild the ROM or SA on the drive? I really don't know what to do next.

Pacient:
WD800JD-08LSA0
Date: 27 OCT 2005
SN: WMAM9F765651
Size: 80 GB
DCM: DSBANTJCH
PCB: 2060-701335-003 REV B
PCB sticker: 2061-701335-A00 AH

Donor:
WD800JD-22LSA0
Date: 15 NOV 2005
SN: WMAM9H745268
Size: 80 GB
DCM: HSBHNTJCA
PCB: 2060-701335-003 REV B
PCB sticker: 2061-701335-A00 AH


Attachments:
File comment: exported from WDmarvel demo
Export.zip [931.37 KiB]
Downloaded 8 times
Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 17th, 2025, 7:44 
Offline

Joined: October 30th, 2025, 4:31
Posts: 19
Location: Dublin
Hello and welcome to the forum,

If you've been able to transfer original ROM to a donor pcb, you should have a fully working pcb now, in theory.
No need to rebuild the ROM.

ROM rebuild is required, if your original pcb is toast to the state it's not possible to read anything from it.
But this is not your case.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 17th, 2025, 18:37 
Offline

Joined: October 3rd, 2005, 0:40
Posts: 4753
Location: Hungary
your original issue might have been related to a defective via in the feedback path of the -5V supply of the preamp (this pcb was prone to develop such problem). As a result, this supply voltage elevated to harmful levels. At about -8V hdd began clicking but no further damage occurred. Often the FB path got completely broken, which resulted in about -25V on the -5V line. Now this was definitely harmful, usually killed the preamp but somewhere in the middle it began overwriting the data in an uncontrolled way, so user data, servo data both got seriously corrupted, sometimes beyond recovery.
If your drive still reads albeit slow, it might be hit by some amount of corruption, not sure if you would notice defective sectors are slowing down the process... Never used ddrescue, does it log problems to screen or file ?

pepe

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 17th, 2025, 19:09 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: September 8th, 2009, 18:21
Posts: 16955
Location: Australia
pepe wrote:
so user data, servo data both got seriously corrupted, sometimes beyond recovery.

Every SA module has a checksum of 0x00. Isn't it more likely that the patient's head adaptives are not close enough to the donor's, and would a transfer of adaptives from donor ROM to patient ROM be something worth trying?

BTW, is this one of those models where the head screw affects the alignment?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 18th, 2025, 5:02 
Offline

Joined: October 3rd, 2005, 0:40
Posts: 4753
Location: Hungary
Quote:
My old personal HDD have burned PCB (SMOOTH chip) and was in state of making clicking sounds and was not rezognized in the system or BIOS.

this was a bit self-contradicting, if SMOOTH is burnt, hdd hardly ever spins up. I would say never. So i suppose it wasn't actually burnt, more likely the above described issue occured.
the corruption occurs without fw interaction coz of constant write due to preamp damage or malfunction. So CS never occurs in this process.
Since drive is clicking between park area and approximately the middle of the platter, mainly the 2nd half of the user area is affected usually.

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 19th, 2025, 4:13 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: January 28th, 2009, 10:54
Posts: 3547
Location: Greece
fzabkar wrote:

BTW, is this one of those models where the head screw affects the alignment?

yes.

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


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 21st, 2025, 7:19 
Offline

Joined: November 7th, 2025, 6:15
Posts: 5
Location: Slovakia
Currently using HDDSuperClone and 48.1GB of data rescued, but the drive has too many bad sectors. Drive has 2785 power cycles and >12799 hours
I have attached images of the burned SMOOTH chip of pacient PCB and original head from pacient, it seems that it has no screw for adjustment or I'm wrong? It just slides off when dissasembly.
When there are good sectors average read speed is ~55 MB/sec, bad sectors skipping or slow read speed ~10 KB/sec

I will let it run day or two and I hope it will complete


Attachments:
hdd.png
hdd.png [ 1.69 MiB | Viewed 350 times ]
pacient_head.png
pacient_head.png [ 943.9 KiB | Viewed 350 times ]
pacient_pcb.png
pacient_pcb.png [ 1.43 MiB | Viewed 350 times ]
Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 21st, 2025, 7:51 
Offline

Joined: October 3rd, 2005, 0:40
Posts: 4753
Location: Hungary
hey, was it spinning and clicking with that smooth??

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 21st, 2025, 7:53 
Offline

Joined: November 7th, 2025, 6:15
Posts: 5
Location: Slovakia
pepe wrote:
hey, was it spinning and clicking with that smooth??

Hi, yes it was


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 21st, 2025, 15:36 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: September 8th, 2009, 18:21
Posts: 16955
Location: Australia
It looks like the drive took a hit on the 12V side. That's where the spindle motor and VCM MOSFETs are powered from.

Do you have a dump of the donor ROM?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 23rd, 2025, 6:09 
Offline

Joined: November 7th, 2025, 6:15
Posts: 5
Location: Slovakia
fzabkar wrote:
It looks like the drive took a hit on the 12V side. That's where the spindle motor and VCM MOSFETs are powered from.

Do you have a dump of the donor ROM?


Yes, I have attached the bin of donor ROM as zip file because forum will not allow me to upload bin directly.


Attachments:
donor_original.zip [126.3 KiB]
Downloaded 11 times
Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 23rd, 2025, 12:45 
Offline
User avatar

Joined: September 8th, 2009, 18:21
Posts: 16955
Location: Australia
I have patched the donor's ROM resident module 0x47 into the patient ROM. You could try to supplement your recovery with this modified ROM. Hopefully those bad sectors will now be readable.


Attachments:
Patient_with_donor_47.7z [126.77 KiB]
Downloaded 9 times

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.
Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: WD800JD-08LSA0 very slow imaging
PostPosted: November 26th, 2025, 10:24 
Offline

Joined: November 7th, 2025, 6:15
Posts: 5
Location: Slovakia
Thank you fzabkar, it looks like it can read the bad sectors now! I managed to rescue all important data from the drive, so I call it success. Thank you everyone!
Have a nice day :D


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 13 posts ] 

All times are UTC - 5 hours [ DST ]


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 51 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group