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).
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 in PC-3000 version 6.0 and later.
The “Building ROM image from SA data” tool was fully revised in the PC-3000 6.0 software version so the process is different from 5.X versions.
We have another article about the process for PC-3000 v5.X that can be found here.
The procedure allows to recover full image of original ROM and all ROM modules.
The procedure is applicable to almost all WD Marvell architecture drives with internal (integrated into processor) ROM, that has SA modules 102, 103, 105, 107 and 109. Some firmwares has SA module 109 that doesn’t contain necessary data – ROM image. If we open such 109 module in HEX-editor we’ll see that it is filled with zeroes. In such cases the utility can’t built the image and gives error.
This procedure is not applicable to drives with external ROM IC (U12) as well as to classical WD Caviar architecture drives(non-Marvell).
WD 2,5″ drives:
There is quite useful T>[Ctrl+X] terminal command on Seagate F3 drives which show last executed commands by the drive. From its output we can define non-readed LBA and sys file which located on that LBA.
In this article we are going to describe the first steps of PC-3000 system usage.
All these questions will be described below:
In our final part of article Methods of data correction, we will speak about voltage control. In which cases voltage control can help us to fix errors?
If to say in a few words – it can help only in the most problematic cases, where the number of bit errors still very high even after ECC correction and readout procedure. Basically, voltage control – is a sort of ReadRetry operation, but in a manual mode. Instead chip itself, we set our own voltage for reading each page in NAND chip using software control.
This voltage control option is available only in following PC-3000 Flash devices:
We get many questions from our customers about how to determine the points where to solder SATA connector on SAMSUNG Spinpoint USB drive.
Here is the easiest method.
There are two types of USB PCBs:
1. With separate SATA-USB bridge;
In previous article we spoke about ECC correction – first and the main way of bit error correction. Sometimes this feature might be very effective, but in case if your NAND chip base on TLC architecture, there is a high chance that after ECC correction a huge part of data will be still damaged. Because as we know – Error Correction Codes can fix only limited number of errors. If for example, on one range (1024 bytes of DA) we have 50 bytes of ECC, it possible to fix only around ~25 bytes of errors. And in case if the number will be bigger (26-27 bytes), errors will be not corrected and our range will stay damaged.
In this line of articles we will speak about different ways of dump correction. I think that it is not a secret that during NAND memory chip reading some bit errors might appear. The number of bit errors depends from the following things:
And of course, if you want to get 100% recovery from user flash drive, first of all you need to fix as much ECC errors, as you can. Otherwise all data will be corrupted, not workable or partially damaged:
Just remember that BIT ERROR CORRECTION IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!
