PC-3000 Forum

ACE Lab company has developed a new unique method of working with damaged WD Caviar HDD Green, Blue and Black with capacity from 500 Gb up to 2 Tb.

This is how damage looks like:

WD HDD spins up spindle motor, tries to unpark its head stack and read service information, but it stops spindle motor and displays ready state. New solution method enables to initialize HDD into work, reach its service area modules, check them and recover those modules which are damaged. After it, your HDD gives access to data.

This feature will be available for all TS users together with the new version of PC-3000 for Windows UDMA with Data Extractor which will be released in the nearest time.

do we have any update on that ? i have wd32000aajs-00l7a0 WD blue drive that seems to do exactly that.
how can i handle the case ?

Got the latest update. Any instruction on how this works? I have a WD15EARS do what is decribed.
Thanks

Hi,

where i can find some instruction of how to use this new method?

Hello

Here I will describe how to use new method.
So when your drive will stop rotation and will get ready state, run WD Marvell utility in kernel mode.
Go to SA regions editor

There you will see two or more regions (about regions you can read in WD Marvell manual)

We should change initial ABAs of first two regions to prevent loading of SA. So double click on first region and change 0 to 1 (add 1 to current value) in the Region address field

Now we have situation like on the picture below

Press OK.
This operation changes the address of SA an prevents the loading of SA, then prevents stopping of the motor because of some SA damages.
Restart power and run utility in normal mode. Drive should keep spinning now.
After that to work with SA we have to load loader to the drive. Loader is the 11 module from HDD with the same FW version.
So go to LDR file loading

Select proper loader, press ok.
After successful LDR loading we can check heads by trying to read 90 module. Actually HDD must read 90 module in any condition if motor is rotating and heads are good.
Go to View module 90 information

If you will get response like on the picture below you can suppose that heads can read SA.

After that we should find modules in SA.
Go to Module search in SA

Press on the button Start search (button with binocular), select search by ABA.

Press ok.
After that utility knows location of the SA modules and we should add this info into Modules directory menu. Before that Modules directory in the utility is blank (you can check it), because DIR module of the drive was not read.
To add info about modules location into Modules directory menu press on the button Use DIR in utility

Confirm that you really want to use directory table and go into Modules directory menu.
There you can check SA, create report and etc. At first we suggest to check 32 module, usually it looks good, but for some reasons HDD does not work because of it. In the good drive this module should have only header and just zeros after header. If you will find that this module in your patient has more info, try to rewrite from some other good drive or just fill it by zeros leaving header. After filling by zeros you have to correct check sum using plugin for it.
Instead of manual cleaning of 32 module you can use "solve slow responding problem". It will clear 32 module and fix check sum automatically.
Please try this method and post here comments and questions.

Nice job ACE! This works well.

I used the method for some cases and it works fine, one of case was like Igor said , module 32 have some not necessary data.

Thanks.

Hi to all , works for me too. Also need to use Solv "slow responding" problem after this procedure

Is there an update for this that works with WD Marvell ROYL drives (WD20EARS; 2 TB Green in my case)? Trying these procedures does not keep the motor spinning (as detected by an oscilloscope on the 4 motor contacts.) My problem symptom however, seems to be the same.

hi everybody
i done the method as you guide.
but i faced a problem that you see in the attached picture.
i could not get back the model and capacity.

hdd: W3200AAJS

txn in advanced.

Hello.

I tried this with WD10EALX-009BA0 and the motor does not keep spinning. Any idea how to make it work?

T

Probably obvious to most, but it seems you must read modules by ABA and not by ID in the final stage.
Also, the first time I did it, all the modules were shifted by 1 sector, perhaps the region address was reselected to 1 intead of 0 on the search ABA box, due to clicking the first line of Region address, instead of just putting "0" in the box then directly clicking "OK"... I didn't think I did that, but anyway, it worked the 2nd time.

Now my only problem is that module 32 isn't the issue....it's something else.

ThomasH wrote:
Now my only problem is that module 32 isn't the issue....it's something else.

You should try hotswap.

I find recently several WD cases where Zone table is damaged (03.rpm) and causes spindle to stop and status register to show ERR and ABR.

I used this method .It worked very fine . Thanks Igor

After getting to the last step, fixing module 0032 to leave only header, how and with what commands I start Data Extractor to get to the data?
No Hardware or Software reset?