PC-3000 for HDD. Heads stack adaptive parameters(Microjogs) transfer on WD drives

Sometimes after heads stack replacement the new heads stack works not stable. That occurs because every heads stack has its unique adaptive parameters. Those parameters are stored in module 47 of ROM.

The adaptive parameters are more different from one batch of drives to another and is connected with date of manufacture. That is why it is recommended to select donor drive for heads stack with the closest date of manufacture possible. Some heads stacks from exactly the same drive as your patients can be totally incompatible due to these parameters.

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PC-3000 for HDD. RAM Head map editing on WD drives (non-system head case)

In some cases a drive with one or more malfunctioning heads can finish the initialization process without any visible errors. But when we try to read user area it results in error and no user data can be read. For example it can occur when one or more heads have problems with writing.

The procedure allows to get access to data on all normally working heads of the drive when SA and at least one of system heads are OK.

The main idea of this method is to to trick the drive calibration procedure through substitution of a normal head instead of a malfunctioning one. Consequently it works with drives using two or more heads.

Also it can be applicable when one of the system heads is damaged. In such cases the patient drive may produce clicks, knocks and turn down the spindle. This case will be reviewed in details in the next article.

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PC-3000 Flash. How to unsolder TSOP-48\56 memory chips

In this article we will try to describe the optimal way for NAND memory chip unsoldering in TSOP-48 or TSOP-56 package. Before you will start the whole procedure of unsoldering, you must be sure that you have all required tools, enough time and patience! 🙂

This procedure is very important for further data recovery. If you will overheat chip – cells inside memory might be destroyed, and the number of bit errors will seriously grown up. If you will not heat the contacts well enough, you can damaged them during chip removing and make your further recovery very-very complicated or even impossible.

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PC-3000 for HDD. The HOT SWAP procedure for Western Digital Marvell drives

The “HOT SWAP” procedure can be used to restore logical access (i.e. an opportunity to read data using Data Extractor) in cases when system heads are inoperable (calibration procedure cannot be successfully completed because a drive is knocking and fails to initialize completely all the items it needs to operate via logical access), or when service area restoration is not possible (no opportunity to rewrite modules).

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PC-3000 Flash. Page tranformation

All the data stored in a flash microchip is divided into several categories:

1. Page (a group of sectors, 4-8-16 or more (varies from chip to chip))
2. Block (a group of pages, 64-128-256-258 or more)
3. Bank (a group of blocks)
4. Dump (a complete image)

page transformation1

Each sector contain 512 bytes of the Data Area and some bytes of the Service Area. For example, “classics” sector structure is: 512 bytes of Data + 16 bytes of SA.

The Service Area contains some data that is used by controller, for example it can contain the marker with block number or some ECC codes. SA can be located after each sector, or in the last sector of the page – it depends on the flash chip and controller.

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PC-3000 for HDD. How to solve the Slow Responding Problem

If a WD drive spins up and quickly gets into the ready state, but requires a lot of time to autodetect and fully initialize in the WDC Marvell utility, and if it is read in the Service area modules and user data very slowly, it is highly probable that the drive has a Slow Responding problem.

SlowResp (1)

 

 

 

 

 

PC-3000 can easily solve this problem and make the drive work fast like a new one, if the heads, platters and PCB are in good condition.

Here are the step-by-step instructions.

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PC-3000 DE. Data Extractor RAID Edition. First steps. (Part 3)

This part is a continuation of part 2.
We proceed to work with RAID array and focus on assembling RAID configuration in interactive mode.

A quick introduction:
Sometimes RAID array metadata are damaged or RAID has a non-standard configuration.
Data Extractor RAID Edition enables advanced users to build RAID manually in interactive mode.

RAID_Ico

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PC-3000 DE. Data Extractor RAID Edition. First steps. (Part 2)

This part is a continuation of part 1.
We continue working with a RAID array and focus on the auto-detection functionality in Data Extractor RAID Edition.

RAID array parameters definition for user is tedious work that doesn’t need much creativity.
For this reason Data Extractor RAID Edition entirely automates the detection of RAID configuration for user.

Data Extractor RAID Edition solves the problem of detection and creation of RAID array for beginners.

RAID_Ico

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PC-3000 DE. Data Extractor RAID Edition. First steps. (Part 1)

Data Extractor RAID Edition and RAID data recovery. It’s time to start!

The goal of this guide is to give you enough technical knoledge to learn how to work in Data Extractor RAID Edition.
This is not intended to be a tutorial or manual. The detailed manual can be found in your personal update box

Let’s start with an example.

RAID_Ico

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PC-3000 for HDD. How to solve the SED problem in 2,5″ WD drives

Let’s consider the stuation when we need to recover data from a 2.5 inch WD drive with a USB interface. We have already changed the connection type from USB to SATA (using a compatible SATA PCB or SATA adapter), but when we start the Marvell utility we see the SED locked error.

How to work with such drives?

Let’s study the following method.

 NOTE: Your PC-3000 version should be not lower than 5.9.21 !

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