PC-3000 Forum

Hi all,

Anytimes at working on WD HDD, the PCB's becomes death.
The situation is everytimes near this:
- suspiction of defect head.
- Reading ROM
- and now when i take "ROM map changing", from "From Map" to "Default", after restart the PCB is death.
Jumpering Kernel-mode, - no access for rewriting the ROM.
Is there a way to rewrite the ROM??
Thanks for Help.
Bruno

Well, this drive has an external ROM chip, you can rewrite it from dump on a programmer device.

Here is its location on attached picture.

Dear Roustam
Thank you very much.
I was afraid of that, but hoping the Gurus of ACE maybe now another way, to write back the Bin file.
In the past 25 Jears before at the time i'm working with comodore64 i'm jusing a EPROM programme, but now i dont having this. So i will must buy one of that. What Model you can sugest as good and not to expensiv in cost?
Have a nice weekend and thanks for help.
Bruno

YOU MAY Try this:

SuperPro Model 580U

good starter one

Thank you for the tip, einstein 9.
Bruno

Most welcome

the Advanced ver. of it is the NAND supports more chips
but u should have this anyway

ROM operations with wd were a lot safer on the older models

Can someone from Acelab tell us why in the newer models we have so many problems while trying to ahcnge rom contents via pc3k UDMA? (dead pcbs due to rom logical failure)

-BR-

Hi Roberto, greetings to Brasil.
Me interesting your question too, and is there a way to avoid ROM from death?
Bruno

In the Marvell series, the only way I know is to avoid bad luck

In the Caviar series I used ROM head map as very reliable head diagnostic tool for knocking hdds.

In Marvel series, I try to limit ROM WRITE operations to a minimum, only in cases where there's no external ROM, because of the high percentage of "death" pcbs we had.

Unfortunatelly the Marvell USB families seems to suffer more from this problem than the sata ones did.

Meanwhile, all death pcbs have to go to the "ressurection" process with a dedicated programmer device

So I really wonder if this is:

a) a hardware problem where the ROM wasn't engineered to receive more writes
b) a softare problem where UDMA still has do fix some issues to have a safeproof Marvell family WD ROM write operation.

-BR-