Hi,

i have a WD drive WD10EAVS-32D7B1 (KERMIT) which stays busy on power on. It makes no knocking noises and sounds quite normal on power up. it comes from a verbatim external usb storage and has not been dropped/overvolted. i suspect some sa damage (maybe only logically) so the firmware can not initialize correctly. i can not get it to get ready except in kernel mode in which i can read out the rom so the pcb seems ok. at this point i can imagine a loader would help but i dont have a compatible drive and can not find any currently. does anyone of you much appreciated gurus have a compatible loader? i have pc3000.

Many thanks in advance!

If u can read out rom, please post exact FW version to find a 'loader' for it

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

ROM:
Flash Dir reading....................... : Ok
ROM reading............................. : Ok
ROM Data size........................... : 192 Kb
ROM version............................. : 05.BME
ROM generation.......................... : 05.BME
Link table version...................... : 04.3D.
Heads configuration..................... : by map
Heads number............................ : 6
Heads number in use..................... : 6
Switched off heads...................... : No
Head map................................ : 2,3,4,5,6,7

Firmware version........................ : 000500BM

Additional info from label:

DATE: 19 FEB 2009
DCM DANNNT2MFB

Thanks, pepe, for replying to my post although we had a misunderstanding in the past . i hope this information helps, it is all i can get from the disk at this moment.

Hi,

I have checked, but have not found 000500BM

Honesly I don't remember the misunderstanding... I invented selective memory in addition to that vax

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Hi,

thanks for checking, pepe.

So,

i managed to get access to the sa. since pc3000 does not seem to be able to create a loader for this device i tried reading the service tracks. refering to pc3000 it has 1325 sa spt and every service track read out is 663 kb of size except for cylinder -1 which has 191 kb for head 2,3 and 0 kb for heads 4,5,6 and 7. on cyl 1 were some reading errors so i thought of sa defects but i compared it to another wd drive and this seems perfectly normal. i did a read on all 170 cylinders, all heads and compared all cyls of heads 2 with the ones from head 3 (i think this is main/backup sa, right?). the contents are the same so at this point i think either i deal with some trash the disk has written to its sa on both sa copies or some defect on the pcb. will investigate this further, of course any help is appreciated.

So,

i managed to copy the overlay module (#11) out of the backed up service tracks, 414 sectors at cyl 46 and 45. when i start the drive in safe mode and try to upload the module (as loader) i get a checksum error. maybe this is the error of this drive, corrupted overlay module but i can not say for safe. as said before the drive read out all sa tracks without errors (except cyl 1, seems to be normal). any chance anyone got a sa backup of this drive ?

thanks in advance!

as it seems this drive is quite rare so i uploaded the resources to the download section

Home / PC-3000-UDMA Support / WDC Marvell family utility / Kermit

in case anyone is in need for it. the modules have been extracted from the tracks i could read and their crc's seem to be ok, my earlier statement of bad overlay module has been a mistake. use at your own risk.

thanks gurus for your support. as it seems it all goes back to basics, in this case bad write elements on head 2,3 which are actually main and backup sa heads. the drive stays busy when trying to write to sa at some point between sector 100 to 200 but still can fully read on these heads. i am waiting for donor drive to be delivered then i'll test if it is actually bad pcb (rw-channel defective) or physically damaged heads (i guess the latter).

Nice 4th advent to you all!

Well,

received donor today. it was actually bad heads, hot swap did work.

thanks to all gurus for your support and a very happy christmas!

??? bad heads or hotswap?

the drives sa heads are bad but only write elements. therefore the drive cant initialize and freezes at first try to write to sa. with hotswap i was able to recover the data . hope its clear now.

Good Day
u did Hot Swap or head Swap ? your statement is Quite Confuse.

well...

never said anything about HEAD swap.

i did a HOT swap.

but the heads on patient are actually bad. since only write elements are bad there was no need to do a HEAD swap for recovery purposes (out of my league anyway).