F3 Julias family

[scott]

I've got two different Julias family Momentus Thin drives with the same problem. Firmware 0003DEM1.

They both ID with correct capacity. They UNC on every single sector. PCB and head all test fine on donor drives so it's some kind of SA problem.

They both simply repeat "Seg Read Error at LBA XXXXX" into infinity.

All modules backup fine. Obvious maneuvers of clearing smarts, regenning translator, clearing Glist all work fine but don't change behavior.

Translator recover procedure runs for 24+ hours and never finds a right/left fork error. When viewing sectors through utility it's a mix of all zeros and all "5A5A5A5a".

Any ideas?

[AJ2008]

Check the option for 'read from active utility' in the parameters, when prompted select 'no' for transmit data in spite of error. If data reads now it will be very slow but will confirm the problem is related to SA somehow.

Did you make any repairs previous to trying to read it? Did you check which options are active under 'Edit HDD ID' ?

[scott]

The drive came in detecting fine and UNCing everywhere.. always stuck in the loop described.

Messing around with all the various HDD ID options doesn't change behavior, disabled media cache, supposedly turned off offline scanning (although that appears to be what its doing so I'm not sure that option actually is complete).

The one drive I continue to work on when you read through utility will return repeating 55 AA 55 AA on every sector throughout all LBA ranges. When you say "No" to return on read error it just UNCs and gives nothing.

As I described we have a very compatible donor that this drive's PCB/heads work fine in. But both sets of heads in this patient behave the same.

I manually added sector 0 to the slip just to see if the behavior changes and it does. The previous behavior of 55 AA 55 AA is now gone. Now it's showing mostly 00 00 on all the UNC'd sectors.. I'm going to try and run the recalcuate translator now to see if it picks up any forks in the road.