PC-3000 Forum

Any general advice when dealing with this Europa family when it has corrupted firmware? Most of the standard tricks don't yield any fruit.

For example:

1. Heads Map editing in RAM doesn't work (even on healthy drives, with either the new algorithm or the old)
2. Disabling SA Access by shifting the SA Region and using a loader does not allow any SA access (even on a healthy drive using its own 11, it will fail loading the flash ROM dir module 0B and fail to load SPT)
3. When dealing with bad firmware when you can access by ID, it seems that while you can read the healthy modules (no option for ignoring errors in ID mode for some reason?) you can't successfully write back by ID (it says "OK" but never sticks).
4. Hot-swaps on these drives always immediately tick on restart. Even when your donor is the same firmware and same heads map. On a current case I've even written every module but 33/31 (which are bad) to my donor.. donor boots OK with patient s/n and still immediately ticks and dies on hotswap... so it isn't related to adaptives in SA or ROM.

Only thing physically about these Europas that is different seems to be that the heads screw into the chassis instead of free floating on a post. I'm thinking this is somehow involved in their odd behavior?

What is the original symptoms of the HDD? Head mapping is same on donor and patient? You can try better hotswap without writing all SA, just some adaptive mods.

LDR wont work on this model, in some models regions shift by itself gives ABA access with no LDR, otherwise read via ID only. Hotswap should work OK though,

Not posting really any particular case, although the most recent one had the standard "blank ID" detection without capacity. Drive had good heads and PCB (tested on donor). Drive had failed modules 11, 31, 33 and a large amount of corrupted garbage modules.

I was able to get it running by shifting regions and NOT using a loader which yielded ABA access. I wasn't able to fix the 31 and 33 by standard practices, but I just "shrunk" them to avoid the DEAD areas. Mostly I was just curious if anyone could give any insight into why loaders never work but perhaps you never need them with this model. Always on this series drive it seems to be firmware issues, and the methods to address them are always cumbersome and not straightforward.