I have a WD800BB-00CAA1 that initially displayed a corrupted serial number (SN:ú€
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) and LBA: 0. I tried the usual first trick of swapping the PCB and exchanging the EEPROM but this did not fix the issue. I also tried just uploading the ROM contents to the functional donor drive, which made that drive display the corrupt serial number, implying that the problem was in the ROM itself. After speaking with Harvey at SalvationData he suggested a PCB swap without moving the EEPROM but uploading the ATA module (in this case I believe it was module #02) from the good drive to the corrupt drive. This restored functionality to a degree: the drive now shows up as WDCWD800BB and I was able to image about 14 gigs before it stopped working. Now if I attempt to scan it with MHDD it is very slow to respond and will only scan about a line or two before it just gives me all AAAAAAAAAAAAA. The drive spins up normally and doesn't click, but does make a faint seek noise about once every three seconds.

Anyone have any suggestions? It seems to me that maybe using this board with some other drive's ROM is not quite functional enough to get a clean image? Is there any way to repair the ROM itself? I've attached it to this post just in case anyone wants to have a look. I had to rename it to .txt so that the forum would allow the upload.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Well, it's looking like the issue now is that one of the heads has failed? After a bit more playing around I got the drive to the point that it would reliably scan a few lines in MHDD followed by a line or two of gray mixed with brown and green followed by a few lines of all AAAAAAAA. I can use the arrow keys to skip out of the AAAA section and repeat the pattern. This was after I was able to image about 20 gigs of data off of the end of the drive.

My only remaining curiosities are: why does the drive work with a foreign ROM? I was under the impression that these were unique to each drive and contained important adaptive data.

Additionally, the fact that this drive identifies as WDCWD800BB and not WDCWD800BB-00CAA1 is odd. Does this mean that something is still unreadable on the drive where it is attempting to pull identification info?

Also, for beto, the module was number 02, just had the title of ATA module.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

WD made in that time period does not have unique ROM, as some other drives such as IBM Travelstar.
You can still read data with those heads and a use of some equipment such as PC3000 but it will take a long time.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

beto, drccsc is right module 02 is an overlay on such drives

about the drive
it's returning ID info from ROM. Serial number should be corrupted for that type of init. Such behavoir could point to some problems. One of them can be weak heads another is SA damage
I vote for heads

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Hy doomer i see thanks for the acclaration , well the problem of AAAAAA, looks like a MHA problem, maybe drscc could build a head map for this family , and clone using the "good heads" , from this way u should be detect if its a MHA problem or SA of course did a SA test before, i dont have salvation wd, so i dont know how does did the SA structure

Regards

the drive should return read errors in UA because it didn't init properly and it didn't init properly because it wasn't able to read SA and it wasn't able to read SA because of weak heads or read errors in SA
As I said I vote for heads

To read UA drive should compose translator in memory w/o that one-head-at-a-time reading will not help

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

More testing results: I reuploaded the original ROM to the drive. At this point it is running off of original PCB, original ROM, and donor module #02 (ATA). The ID does not properly show the "-00CAA1" suffix but the serial number does show correctly. Scanning in MHDD would appear to indicate that one head is completely off, one is weak, and two are functioning normally. The display is about 50% normal looking, 25% gray/red/green/brown and 25% solid AAAs. It alternates in a repeating pattern.

As I said, after uploading the donor module I was able to image about 18GB worth of the disk before it started exhibiting the above symptoms, so to me it sounds like the head was just on the way out and finally died.

As for head mapping and translator regeneration, as far as I can tell the salvation tools lack this function. I can depop individual heads, but it seems to me that that would completely garble any remaining data.

Thanks for your thoughts, Doomer, beto, and harddrivespecialist.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

hi as i can see in my wd doctor (v2.50, check if you have v2.32) you can customize your own headmap.
if you go to the "rom operation" window then you can see the "head operation" options you can read the current head map and change it as you wish, for translator regeneration you can find it on "sector defect repair" window.
I never used these options on SD products as normally i do this kind of works on pc3k.

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Data Recovery pro in Italy
www.ultrarecovery.com