Just got an MK8025GAS drive in, with a problem I've never seen before. The drive does not click, but it just stays in a constant BSY state and is therefore unrecognized. In PC3000 it stays busy. In many of these drives, it seems like the spindle motor is the root cause of most problems, but the platters spin with no apparent resistance. I can actually feel the heads move, like it starts to calibrate but doesn't finish. In other cases where the spindle motor has been an issue, if the drive doesn't get up to the proper RPM the heads won't even move, so I think I have to rule out that possibility.

I took the drive into the clean room and opened it just to get an idea as to what it is doing, and it was very strange. The drive spins up, the heads move over they appear to start calibrating for a split second and then they literally just kind of bounce back, really loose like, towards the middle of the platter and stay there. It's almost like they are on a rubber band and someone just snapped it loose. Then they just stay there until you power the drive off and they park themselves.

Since I have no way of really diagnosing this drive properly, I'm thinking about heating the spindle motor first as I normally would with a bad bearing, just to eliminate that possibility. If that doesn't work, then I may swap the ROM over to a good board and see what that does. If that doesn't make a difference, then I guess the only thing left is to swap the heads. However, with these drives being so forgiving with platter swaps, I'd probably just move the platters over. You would think if it gets to that point, new board, new motor, and new heads, something should work. There's really not much left to change if you can't access the system area. I just wanted to see if anyone else here has had similar issues with these drives.

I put my thoughts in PM... for your eyes only. Check mailbox !

Thanks!!! I'll let you know.

This is my guess. I would fix in the following order....

PCB ---- > Heads ---- > Corrupt ROM/Adaptives.

BlackST, am my close?

I' ve seen this before when the PCB was bad.

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Yes. There were some more options too. Customers can be nasty boys...

The first thing I did was call the customer. I don't get much local work, but he's a pretty prominant doctor in the area. Anyway, he said that he was using the laptop one night, he simply shut it off, and when he went to boot it the next day it came up with the error regarding the drive not being found. He had a friend who works on computer look at it, but he never did anything to attempt to physically repair the drive. I made sure to tell him if the original board was not on the drive, we'd have almost no chance of recovering the data. He said he was there, and the guy never took the board off. So I believe him in that regard.

I examined the platters as thoroughly as I could. I could see no evidence of scoring at all, and the heads looked fine. So I set up a very primitive way to see if the customer's drive was being loaded down by a bad bearing. I hooked up the customer's drive and a parts drive to the same power supply. Once they were powered up, I powered them off and in most cases when the bearings are bad the drive will stop spinning very fast. In this case, the customers drive stopped spinning about 3/4 of a second before the parts drive everytime I tried it. So that was the only difference I could detect there, and it wasn't much. I realize it's not very scientific, but at least it gave me some idea how the spindle motor was working in comparison to a fully functional drive.

I had an exact match parts drive, so the next thing I did was transfer the customer's ROM to the parts drive PCB. Exact same symptoms.

After that, I went for a full head swap. Same results.

Just to confirm the condition of the components of the customer's drive, I mounted the parts drive's ROM onto the customer's PCB and I put the customer's heads into the parts drive. The parts drive worked absolutely flawlessly afterwards. So the heads and PCB from the customer's drive were fine. Since the heads functioned so well, this also makes it doubtful that there is any scoring to the platters since the heads would have probably at least been degraded a bit.

So now I'm at a point where the only thing left is transplanting everything over and using the parts drive's spindle motor. Since at this point, with new heads and new PCB that is the only thing left.

The problem I have is that I can't access the ROM data, or at least I don't know how to. PC3000 just stays in a BSY state when the drive is powered up, so I have no access that way. Like I said, the heads move over to calibrate and then flop back to the middle of the platter and just stay there. I mean the really just flop back, like they are on a spring or something. So I don't have any way to access the data that might be on the ROM to verify if there is any damage there or not. At this point, I'm going to put off transferring the platters until tomorrow. I want to spend the evening thinking about this, and trying to come up with other possible reasons this may be occuring. I just hate blindly changing parts if I don't have to. I like to know why I'm changing them first.

PM sent BlackST

It's 7.00 AM and starting an awful day. I have some idea, but need to be at PC not on mobile like right now. Wait a few hours I'll PM you - hope it's not super urgent case.

I had an exact same case several months ago. Swapping the platters will not make much difference but give it a go so you got an bases covered. I didn't get the data but the client wan't prepared to pay a lot.

I gave myself another full day to think about this case. I think I'm out of options. Just going to swap the platters tomorrow and hope for the best. If it doesn't work, I don't know that there is much more that can be done. Thanks for everyone's help, especially the PM's that were sent. I really appreciate it.

Latest Update

I swapped the platters this morning, and since the heads from the customer's drive worked fine when I put them in the parts drive, I went ahead and put them back, just to make sure everything was native to each other. There was a slight difference in the way the drive reacted. This time, instead of the heads just flopping back to the middle of the platter, they actually moved to the very outside edge and just stayed there. Same symptoms...the drive just goes into a constant BSY state. Although I did notice yesterday, sometimes it would be in a BSY state with the DRD light on as well, but getting to the SA was impossible so I have no way of verifying any issues that may be present there.

As an additional point of confirmation, I went ahead and put the platters and heads from the parts drive into the customer's case. The drive works absolutely perfectly, just like it came that way from the factory. So we can rule out any possibility of the motor causing the problem in the customer's drive.

So to summarize, I swapped the customer's ROM over to the parts drive PCB, which didn't help. I swapped the heads, which didn't help. I swapped everything over to the parts drive case, to utilize that motor, which also didn't help. In turn, EVERYTHING from the customer's drive worked perfectly in the parts drive. I'm at a loss, especially since I have no other way that I know of to access the SA.

Just throwing this out there. Maybe you can access SA using hot swap.

Not on Toshiba

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are u sure the patient PCB is native?

pepe

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As far as I know yes. I told the customer that it was absolutely imperative that it be the original board, or the data would not be recoverable. Like I said in an earlier post, this guy is a pretty prominent doctor, and he desperately needs this data. He wouldn't even think about lying in regards to the board having been swapped. The person who helped him originally, just tried to hook it up and run some software on it, but since that didn't get anywhere, they brought it to me.

Hook up the board to PC3k, power up, wait until ready, then read ID and check serial against the number on the HDA.

pepe

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That was the very first thing I did when I got the drive. I could let it sit there until the sun falls out of the sky, and it never comes ready. I let it sit for 5 hours the first day.

Start utility and bring up terminal. Remove the PCB and connect it to terminal. Pwr on and press enter. If you are lucky it may come DRD. Then enter "VR" for example. If it not comes DRD, remove the SFM and read it externally. Or move it to a known functional board and test this procedure.

Sorry, my previous post is not applicable to this family apparently.

I did the following:
- Start 25GAS util
- start terminal (terminal connection needs to be established)
- power up the pcb
- press enter in terminal, PCB should become ready
- now u can read CP56 that contains HDD ID and serial
- compare serial to the one on the label

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery