Hi All,

I have noticed a pattern of faults with Toshiba GSX Drives that we are receiving for recovery. I wonder has anybody else seen similar issues....

Drive spins and calibrates, shows ID and appears ready. However, drive makes a repeated "chirp" sound, rather than a click. Sector access attempts result in further chirping, drive staying busy and failing to read sectors.

Head swap results in exactly the same symptoms. Swapping patient heads into donor drive results in fully functional drive indicating that this is NOT a head related fault.

Unfortunately this drive isn't yet supported by PC3K, but I believe it may be a SA or media related fault.

Has anybody had a similar experience?

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Data Recovery Ireland

I havent noticed this problem yet. Had quite a few in. The last one I recovered was not spinning and was making a slight ticking sounds. I assumed stiction or bad motor, I was wrong. It was a pcb fault, moved rom to new pcb, disk was fine. This is probably unrelated but it might be an idea to try another pcb.

Cheers Spaz, I'm fairly sure it's not PCB related. Drive is spinning perfectly and appearing ready, but sector access causes it to give me BSY and ABRT.

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Data Recovery Ireland

I wrote about a similar issue two days ago.
I swapped heads between two MK1234GSX because it became ready after too long time and then continuously recalibrated while imaging, resulting in 50kB/s at max.
The old heads work fine in the donor, but not the intended way round.
It seems to be an issue with the bearings preventing the drive to reach and/or maintain working speed. I'll check it the next days.

In all fairness these 2 problems are probably not related but it won't hurt to swap platters if all else fails. Eliminate PCB, SA, HEADS, BAD Media first though.

One thing that I have noted with Toshiba drives is that the ROM contains all the necessary information needed for the drive to come online and ready. So, it is likely not a problem with the PCB. My vote is for swapping the platters to a functional enclosure, as the motors seem to be a common issue with Toshiba drives.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Well, the RPM is easy to check, if it not RPM only adaptives can be.

Chirping sounds like motor bearing problem to me.

of Toshibas that fail, about 85% of them have motor / bearing issues in our experience.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

It's could be PCB or motor
and also could be SA

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

I'm not totally convinced it's a motor issue. Unlike the typical failure that we are used to seeing on a 3021GAS or similar, the motor on this drive sounds like it's spinning to full RPM. As a test, I applied some heat to the motor and it did behave a little better, in fact, I got access to some sectors...........so the plot thickens!

I've some test drives with similar faults so if I find anything useful, I'll be sure to post....

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Data Recovery Ireland

Check the exact rotational speed either in normal and when heating the motor.

Hi CK,
I believe adaptive data of your HDD has badly damaged.
To verify my words just write adaptive modules from a different
HDD to your working HDD (of course not your patient drive ) and power cycle it.
You will hear the same "chirp" sound.
In your situation it is very difficult to recover data.
IHO, changing Head,SPM and PCB won't help. You have to find a way to
repair your adaptive data modules.

Regards,
Pninja

CK you get anywhere with this.

I have a MK8032GSX. Disk comes ready, detects but when sectors are scanned in MHDD they are read are a stupidly fast rate. Disk was making a scatchy noises much like when the motor is failing. I have changed heads, swapped platter and tried another pcb. Still exactly the same disk condition. The disk seems to be unable to read sector servo so it looks like this has adaptives problem. Either that or the media is bad.

Anyone ever recovered from such a fault?

Yes i got similar case, GSX, families, some years ago, head swap, platter swap, even get the most problems fortunely on this case, the HDD reach readiness, but still doing grinding noise, like when heads touch th surface but fortunely, changing some settings to read was possible to get some data, on this year got another case similar like u GSX Family again, like u case the hdd reach readiness, but when u tried to read any sector´s start that sound,s did head swap with donnor and reach readinesa again start to read the first sectors and the problem´s starts again, return donnor heads to donnor HDA; and still works, so im think its a surface problem, microscopic scratch´s on the coating.

Regards

Hi beto,

What settings did you change?

Thanks