PC-3000 Forum

I have a Sandisk Ultra II that when I turn it on, it is not ready (see image)

It is based on the marvell 88SS9190 controller.
I cannot find any burnt chips on the board.
Any suggestions?

Hello.

When you power ON the drive, it must provide you ATA-registers info. DRD+DSC - means READY, drive ready to work. BSY - Busy with some background process (SSD is trying to load the translator tables of FW but due to the corruption goes into the loop of LOADING-ERROR-RESET-LOADING, etc).

In your case, drive shows all ATA registers ON, like there is absolutely no any feedback by ATA channel from the CPU. If you disconnect the drive and make a POWER ON, you will get the same ATA registers status.

Most likely, this drive has a serious hardware problem - damaged CPU or a bad contact between the CPU and PCB. Try to heat the CPU using the liquid flux, maybe it would become possible to restore the lost contact.

But the most effective way would be the NAND memory transfer to another, working PCB from donor. No need to swap the CPU - it contains only encryption mechanism. All encryption keys are located on the NAND chips, so swap only them.