Re: Hard drive repair (longish)
- From: PlainBill <PlainBill47@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 10:14:04 -0700
On Sun, 03 Apr 2005 03:18:59 GMT, Ken Weitzel <kweitzel@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
>
>PlainBill wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:38:49 -0700, PlainBill <PlainBill47@xxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Well, I really blew it this time. About a month ago I replaced my 120
>>>gig hard drive with a new 200 Gig Maxtor, model # 6B200P. In
>>>violation of my common sense, I did NOT keep the old drive as a
>>>backup. Well, the new drive went belly up last week - it wouldn't
>>>even spin up. Some of the stuff on the drive is easily replaceable,
>>>but many of the pictures of my Granddaughter cannot be replaced.
>>>
>>>I requested an advance replacement from Maxtor, and when it arrived I
>>>tried to repair the bad drive by swapping the electronics boards. I
>>>verified these had identical part numbers. This had a limited sucess:
>>>The new hda does not spin up with the old electronics board; the old
>>>hda DOES spin up with the new board. However, the drive does not
>>>properly report it's size. The new drive reports it is 203.9 Gig; the
>>>new electronics board with the old hda reports it's size as 250 Gig,
>>>then generates POST errors.
>>>
>>>At this point I can restore the electronics boards to the proper hdas
>>>and return the old drive to satisfy the terms of the advance
>>>replacement, since I have not altered anything. The last option I am
>>>considering is a part which appears to be a SST Serial flash chip. It
>>>should be possible to swap these between boards if I unsolder with
>>>chip-quik, but I'm not looking forward to it.
>>>
>>>Does anyone have any experience with these drives, or any advice to
>>>give?
>>>
>>>PlainBill
>>
>> I'd like to thank everyone who made a suggestion, and give a status
>> update on this. First of all, if you made a suggestion; thanks. For
>> the record, setting a drive limit jumper does not help.
>>
>> Through a little chicanery I obtained a second DiamondMax 10 200 Gig
>> hard drive. Unfortunately, that also was the same firmware as the
>> replacement. So I started to do some research.
>>
>> Surprisingly, there are only 5 ICs on this drive. There is a L7250E
>> motor / voice coil controller, which is quite well documemted, and
>> does not have any memory. There is a 40003 IC, which I have not been
>> able to find any solid data, but did find a siggestion that it might
>> be a pwm encoder / decoder (possibly r/w data?). There is a
>> K4S641632H 8 Mbyte memory chip - obviously buffer memory. There is
>> the 25VF010 1 Mbit serial flash memory. And lastly, we have an Agere
>> 040116600; which would have to be the controller.
>>
>> As the next experiment, I swapped boards between the two working
>> drives; a quick test seems to indicate there is no HDA specific
>> information on the board.
>>
>> I compared all the numbers on each IC with it's equivalent part on the
>> other boards. In all cases, each number was either identical on all
>> three ICs (part number, revision level, etc) or different on all three
>> ICs (date of manufacture, lot number, etc).
>>
>> The conclusion: The flash memory does NOT contain a map of bad
>> sectors. The firmware is either in the flash menory, or in the main
>> controller IC. For my next experiment I will try swapping this
>> between two boards with DIFFERENT firmware.
>>
>> PlainBill
>
>Hi Plain (may I call you that? :) :)
>
>Sorry to hear you haven't quite got your pics back; glad to
>hear that you're still trying and learning...
>
>Another idea to perhaps rescue your pics if I may?
>
>If you can now easily get the drive to spin up, but bios
>still won't recognize it, how about opening it via api calls
>as a device? I think a few hex editors are capable of doing
>this for you, I know that WinHex will. (Use the tools, disk
>editor option rather than Open; then choose the phyical device
>rather than the logical device option [the logical device
>won't even appear])
>
>At this point it should be relatively easy to search for
>pic headers (and footers); then simply write them to some
>imaginary filename on a good drive.
>
>Course it could be a *lot* of work going through 120 gigs,
>but if your grand daugher and her pics are as important to
>you and her family as mine are to us, then....
>
>Hope that helps, and as an aside... thank you. Kinda like
>taunting you about locking the barn door, but your plight
>has caused us to start burning and snail mailing pics on CD's
>between family members far more often. (my kids live in
>different cities) Darn, CD's are virtually free; so is postage,
>so well worth it for the duplicity and off-site advantages.
>Thanks again! Now praying for your success! :)
>
>Take care.
>
>Ken
Ken,
Thanks for the advice; it might yet come to that. I believe Linux
might be an ideal OS for this - and give me the incentive to learn a
LOT about it.
At this point I have several alternatives. I've been practicing my
rework technique on a spare card, and chipquik makes removing 8 pin
SMT chips a snap; once I demonstrate I can swap a pair of chips twice
without damaging anything, I will be ready to do it for real.
Two other alternatives also present themselves: Several vendors
claim to have the 6B200R0 drives available. Locally, several retailers
carry the drive in the internal kit, I believe I've 'cracked' the
labling and may be able to identify if the drive in the kit is a
6B200R0 (B4GBA firmware), or a 6B200P0 (B2GBA firmware). Lastly, ads
for the Maxtor drives appear to indicate the 6B200R0 drive is
optimized for multimedia; I just might try to get Maxtor to send me
the correct replacement.
PlainBill
.
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