I had an HTS541616J9SA00 come across my desk today. Usually when these drives go bad (in my experience) they are making horrible clicking sounds and have either head or media damage. This particular one powers up and spins fine, but does not identify at all except for LBA: 0. With salvation I am able to see the NVRAM code (C7MP) which is consistent with what it would look like if I removed the PCB from the rest of the drive and powered it by itself.

I am able to download the NVRAM contents from the PCB, which seems to indicate that the NVRAM is not damaged.

I am not able to access the data section of the drive or the SA at all.

I have never had the occasion to use the NVRAM rebuilder, so I don't know if this seems like the right situation for that or not.

Any thoughts?

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

Headstack completely working ? Also, NVRAM is readable, but what about the content ? (trash in it). Sometimes NVRAM corruption does not prevent drive to start, but with strange behaviour.

Did you try to access sa-c?

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

also, just because the drive looks, sounds ok does not mean the head-stack is working properly; rule out firmware first (more likely) then take a second look at the heads.


and as BlackST said; maybe only some of the NVRAM is corrupted.

turned out to be a problem with the PCB. I found a similar enough one and uploaded the original nvram, then everything worked fine.

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

I have the exact same model except mine is not PCB, anyone know how to access SA mods ?

thank you