OldModelT

Greetings to one and all !

I'm a newbie on this forum and I hope that my problem is not too unique for solving. About 2-3 years ago I bought a new Fantom external drive with a WD 500G SATA drive inside. I used it for several months for storing my favorite movies and I was absolutely delighted with its performance, especially the data transfer rate of over 20M/sec over the USB. I usually left the drive turned off when not in use which was most of the time. I also noted without much concern then that the drive seemed to be running rather warm to the touch, as if the supply voltage was a tad too high. At the time when I was initially using this drive, my OS was W98SE.

One day I decided to use this drive to transfer large amounts of data between 2 computers, the other one using XP, when suddenly the status LED stayed red, instead of alternately red & blue. Alarmed by the thought of something wiping out my data, I immediately turned it off. Running WD diagnostics on it later revealed that there was a problem with communication.

Then a long period of time passed where I did nothing at all with it due to the fact that my wife of 31 years had suddenly died and turned my world upside down. Only recently I decided to try to get this drive working again and remembering my previous analysis, I decided to examine the PCB on the HDD for bad solder connections with my 10X magnifier. (I also have industrial experience as an electronics tech.) The SATA connector did look like the solder connections were "cold" or crystalized, so I easily reflowed the connections and I think that might have been part of the initial problem. However I am still harboring some suspicion of the supply voltage causing an overheated condition, although I haven't measured it.

I have tried a number of programs that are meant to recover data from this drive but they all failed even though they recognized it. What would happen is that the program would start by scanning merrily along and then it would hang up, apparently waiting for a response from the HD. When I turned the HD off, the scanning process would resume with continuous error messages of course.

Having exhausted what available data recovery programs I could find with no better results, I resigned myself to the loss of my data and decided to reformat the whole HD because the amount of free space was reported at 430G. Attempting to use a low level formatting program that I had, resulted with the same outcome as the scanning programs, i.e. it would hang up waiting for a response from the HD -- a short time after it would merrily begin -- until I turned it off.

Going into XP's drive manager, I successfully initialized this HD and put a partition on it as well with a free space capacity of 465G. I decided that I could live with that and decided to perform XP's error scanning of the HD. It only completed phase 1 of the scan and reported that it was unable to go further. Furthermore WinExplorer does not recognize this HD even though the device manager reports that there is no problem and even has a drive letter assigned to it.

Research into WD HDs revealed that there is an OS installed on these HDs on the negative cylinders and I am beginning to believe that this OS is corrupted somehow. I have also discovered that there is a program that can read the OS in these drives and even write to it, but the name of the program escapes my memory at the moment.

So this is where I am with this problem and I'm flush out of further resources to continue my quest. Am I going in the right direction with this problem? Should I be doing something different or further? Is it possible to acquire the OS to a WD50 WD-WMAPW1398915?

As always, I appreciate anyone's help!
Russell

raptor_pa

Every drive today has part of the drives firmware code stored in negative cylinders, the Service Area of the drive. What you are describing tho doesn't sound like an issue with the SA code. There are some apps that can access Seagate's SA thru a serial connection to the jumper block of the PCB, but WD doesn't have a serial interface. Straight software will not access the SA, it takes special hardware and software combo to do that ( Salvation Data Disk Doctor, PC3000 ) the DD is about $2500 - PC3k about $13,000 - and they aren't point and click solutions. Anyway, what you describe sounds more like bad sectors, or perhaps weak heads. The code in the SA is also partially unique to each drive - the drive adaptives, including the P-List and G-List ( mapped bad sector lists ) and the Translator ( remaps bad sectors) so it's not as simple as copying all the SA data. If it was an error in the SA, the drive would probably not be recognized.
First thing I would try is scan the disk with MHDD from www.hddguru.com for bad sectors. If there are only a few, then you could remap them ( read the docs for MHDD for details ). What did you use to 'low level format' the drive. About the only thing you can do to modern drives along those lines is to zero-wipe the surface, a true low level - like what SCSI and MFM/RLL drives used to remap the tracks - can't be used on modern drives. It is entirely possible you will find certain areas of the surface throw meore errors than others, this would be indicative of bad platter surface, or something in the firmware for the preamp bias for that zone. With the right hardware a selfscan might correct the preamp bias if that is the issue, but again for the price of the hardware to fix this one, you could buy a LOT of new drives LOL. Let us know how the MHDD scan looks...