In the Basic HDD diagnostics procedure post we looked at the common steps of diagnostics for any HDD.
Now we will look at the specific steps of diagnostics of Seagate F3 architecture drives.
In this article we will discuss the most typical situations and scenarios of Seagate F3 drives diagnostics. We will not dive deep into the solutions since it can make this article endless. We just point out the way to understand the specific issue. Continue reading
The translator is quite a common failure on Seagate F3.
The typical sign is readable sectors at the beginning and unreadable sectors at the end. To be 100% sure that you have a translator problem need to built a headmap in DataExtractor and check the reading of some sectors by each head. As alternative you can check access to some of last sectors via Utility.
In the Basic HDD diagnostics procedure post we looked at the common steps of diagnistics for any HDD.
Now we will look at the specific steps of diagnostics of WD Marvell drives.
In this article we will discuss the most typical situations and scenarios of WD Marvell drives diagnostics. We will not dive deep into the solutions since it can make this article endless. We just point out the way to understand the specific issue.
Also I must note that very often the drive can have not just one problem but a combination of them. For example very typical scenario – so called “Slow Responding problem”:
A writing element of one head degrades ⇒ the firmware detects that sectors were read with errors and adds them to the candidates defect list (R-List) ⇒ The R-List becomes overfilled with fake defects ⇒ the firmware start freezing during drives initialization ⇒ the drive can’t start normally (stays always busy) and we can’t access to the User data.
So we need to understand the internal processes of the drive to find out the source of the problem.
When we diagnose WD drive we should know how to easily determine its architecture.
The easiest way is to look at the PCB.
We can unmistakably determine the architecture by the MCP on the PCB.
Marvell MCP on WD Marvell architecture drives and
WDC MCP on WD Caviar architecture drives.
Due to the fact that many people have a problem with PC-3000 Circuit Board adapter, we suggest to take a look on the principles of the power supply commutation for different devices.
Here you can see appearance of the PC-3000 Circuit Board adapter:
There are several situations could be with a Western Digital drive.
Let’s take a look the most popular of them and discuss about diagnostics and solutions
The procedure is applicable both for WD Marvell and WD Caviar architecture drives.
When we recover Service Area modules we need to be sure that system heads are able to write modules in SA without errors.
Make sure that you have a backup of all important modules of ROM and SA modules before making any changes since we never know the exact moment when heads stop working.
You can perform a full Backup of all resources by pressing “HDD resources backup”.
Here is the recommended manual method to check system heads.
At first we open “Modules directory”:
Tools => Utility extensions => Modules directory
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Sometimes DR specialists start examining the drive from the wrong point that leads to unnecessary wasting of time or even to the situation when the drive becomes unrecoverable.
We want to present to you our recommended procedure of basic examining of the hard drive.
We won’t go deep into specific features of different architectures today. This instruction is common for all the drives.
The method can be used to recover original ROM image and then write it into donor PCB when original PCB was damaged, lost, or original ROM was lost.
The idea is to rewrite the compatible donor ROM image to donor PCB and then recover the unique original ROM modules from SA modules and write them to the PCB.
The procedure is applicable to almost all WD Marvell architecture drives with external (U12 IC is present on PCB) ROM, that has SA modules 35 and 109.
This procedure is not applicable to drives with internal ROM IC (U12 is not present) as well as to classical WD Caviar architecture drives(non-Marvell).
