PC-3000 Forum

Western digital marvell drives can be separated into three groups:

WD Marvell drives with classic CHS Header : 2.5 inch Scorpio , 3.5 inch Mammoth , Sabre53(Sabre), Sabre58(Unicorn), Bucaneer, Hawk, Zeus, Raider, Starling, Hawk2.

MWD-ROYL-CHS 2.5 inch : Orion , Aquarius

MWD-ROYL-ABA with access to SA through ABA coodrinate:
2.5 inch Aries, Lynx, McKinley, Cougar, Denali, Saturn, Mercury
3.5 inch Tornado, Sequoia, Tornado PATA, Jupiter, Tornado 2D, Sequoia PMR, STG Twin, Lakes, Tornado 2PMR, Tornado 2R, Atlantis, Pinnacle, Hulk, Spider, Kermit, Cypress, Gekko, Atlantis PATA, Pinclite Pinnacle PATA and other new families.

Hot-Swap method for CHS Header (worked well on Sabre53, but should also work on other drives with that type :

Donor has to be compartible with patient head map(donor head map should be identical to patient or more heads should exist. Unnecessary heads have to be turned off)

1. Read patient ROM and Tracks
2. Connect Donor drive and copy ROM , then copy all tracks from patient
3. Restart Donor. It has to reach ready state. If you are not sure in translator modules, you can recalculate them
4. Stop spindle motor with "Standby" command
5. Unscrew the board from donor and install it to patient
6. Perform Recalibration command

That method worked well for several Sabre53 cases. If anybody has tried that method on other classic WD Marvell drives, please report.

The above method just worked on a HAWK drive I finished. One peculiarity was that after transferring the Hotswapped PCB back to the client drive, it would not spin back up when clicking Reinitialize. (I tried several times). However, just pressing the reset button on the SATA adapter, then clicking Reinitialize worked. First time I remember having to do that.

Question: How do I read the ROM and Tracks when the Patient drives stays BSY?
Chris

Patient WD should always come DRDY, unless Preamp is bad maybe.

If it does not come DRDY then short read channels to force DRDY then work via ID (hardware checking). Depending which model you have, this may allow for writing.

Alternatively, once you short to get DRDY you can block SA regions in ROM (again depending on model) then after repower you may be able to get access via ABA, if not you can load LDR to get it.

But if your model remains BSY for a long time there is probably some underlying issue that should be resolved

Interesting. This procedure just worked on a wd5000AAKS-41YGA0. Donor was 75YGA0. Patient clicks and spins down. Using normals hot swap ( initialized donor , put it in standby , swapped PCB to patient and ran recalibrate ) i was able to run head test to see all heads pass it and got SA data + Service tracks. After just like tutorial said , copied patient ROM to donor , copied patient SA tracks to Donor , yanked power and donor ID gave me 41YGA0 instead of the 75YGA0 , standby and PCB swap then recalibrate gave me ready lights on the PC3K. I entered previously started Data Extractor task ( it was created immediately after normal hot swap to check if i have user area access even though i knew i wont ) And lo and behold , user area access granted. HFS partition populated and now ima imaging the data out.

OK so even though the procedure worked , the data transfer rate was at about 19kb/s with head 1 head very very slow everywhere and the rest of heads acting ok in some areas and slowing down in some others. At the end of the day i put donor heads into the patient and finished the case at a nice 30mb/s speed.