Hello all. Had a above mentioned drive fall on my lap , was told the heads are bad. And was even given a donor drive.
Patient is WD1600AAJB-00J3A0
DATE : 10 NOV 2009
DCM : HANNNTJAEN

Donor had exact same model , date 1 day apart and 4 ad 5th dcm was exact. Yet donor drive had only 1 head, reading bottom of the drive and patient had 2 heads. Now after swap donor to patient drive didnt init. To make sure that i didnt damage heads - i put em back in donor. Works flawless. So looks like incompatibility here. I am thinking , is it possible that patient drive is using top platter surface for SA ? Maybe i should be looking for a compatible 320gb and just enable head 1 after swap? Also, if anyone has a drive with compatible working heads inside - ill gladly buy it.

I see few problems here.

1

Accurate diagnostics is a 50% of successful solution. Don't you want to make sure heads are definately bad?

2
Why would you do that? You can see that your donor is not compatible, but you did go ahead with a head swap...

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www.datarecoveryne.com

1) Hddspec, i work in a company. When the boss drops the drive at me and tells me to swap heads - thats what i do.


2) Because i already saw drives that had extra heads on them work perfectly fine in the hdds with fewer platters. In this case the 160gb pata drive looks like it shares heads with 320gb versions. Now i am pretty sure that if the drive would have used the bottom of the platter as work surface - everything would be good. Also see answer number 1.

It is nice to have someone to blame for incompetence.....

What if bottom platter is damaged?

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Incompetence? where did u get that from?

what i could see under on the microscope - it wasnt.

Amazing. Hddsspec and Hddguy. U want to tell me that both of u never had a case and didnt hear about cases of hdds sharing heads across several models with different platter counts ?

You were given a disk and 'told' it was head damage. did you not check this yourself to confirm the diagnostic?

You performed Head Replacement with HDD with different Head Map? I agree sometimes this is acceptable, and in many cases through modification of patient Head Map there is a chance for some data access even with a missing head, but I dont like to take chances too often...

Your boss dropped the drive in your lap and told you to change the heads? Who diagnosed this failure, your boss, the client or yourself?



Maybe we just hold clients data at more value than you do, and ensure donors are compatible before attempting physical head replacement. And maybe being aware of differnces in head maps has made for better choices when matching donor criteria...

On the plus side, you are very enthusiastic, this is a good thing I suppose...

Like i say , i work in a company. The way companies work is one gear does one thing , another gear does another. Now i have a lot of freedom to aproach my tasks. Yet i didnt find the need to question my bosses diagnostics before.

No. I dont think u hold clients data at more value then we do.

Yes, i am generally a happy guy. Ty.

This is my last post in this topic.

What I was trying to point you to, is a concept of drive manufacturing.
If you would have understood that concept, you would have never approached recovery the way you did.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

Sry , was hard to understand what do u meen from ur posts. I take it u undestand said concept. Do u have a drive with compatible heads i can buy from u ?