Problem with WD Marvel Demo

[ianc]

Hi Vlad,

I finally had the opportunity to try this today, but the results are not encouraging I'm afraid...

If I select head 0 only as shown:



I get these errors, and the attempt is unsuccessful:



The same occurs if I try selecting only head 1.

Does this mean the drive's electronics are truly destroyed and platter removal is the only option?

I did manage to save a flash.bin file earlier. Was it only from the donor PCB, or from the drive itself?

Should I just give up? As usual, thanks for your help,

Ian

[Vlad]

I forgot that you using demo
PM me your email address, I will give you key for few days

[radekm]

Dear WD Marvel,

My friend's WD Elements drive has serious issue with "slow response" or "lag" with WD Elements drive ?
From what I've read on this topic this is something related to the RELO table on the drive.
Can you help with that ?

best regards
Radek

[Spildit]

WD Elements drives normally don't have encryption.

What is the full model of the drive ?

It's USB only drive or it's a drive inside a case/enclosure that turns the SATA drive intro USB by the use of a bridge board ?

If your drive is inside an enclosure you will need to remove the drive from inside of it - DO NOT OPEN THE DRIVE ITSELF - and plug it directly to SATA.

If the drive it's USB only then you have major problems as you will have to "adapt" the PCB to SATA in order to bypass the USB bridge or you will have to replace with a SATA compatible PCB and adapt it's ROM or compy the content from the original PCB ROM chip (or move it).

If you can plug the drive directly to SATA you can detect it with WDMARVEL and then you can do this :

Heads - Edit Config and :



Uncheck "Background surface scan and error processing enabled" and click SAVE TO SA.

This is the same as applying the module 02 patch that other free tools do :



Go to S/A modules and clear the RO-LO list module - mod 32.

Power off/on the drive. Done.


AS ALTERNATIVE WDMARVEL have a simple way to deal with the Slow Responding problem !

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... t=60#p7673

- Detect the drive.



- Select Defects and Manage Defects :



- On the Defect List Actions window select the option to Deal With Slow Responding :



- Chose the way/method you want to use to deny access to the Re-Lo list and select the option to Turn Off filling the Re-Lo list. Click Ok.

- Done !

- Power OFF/ON the drive and clone it !

More reading :

Researching on a WD drive with the slow issue :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=1456

Regards.

[Spildit]

(...)Does this mean the drive's electronics are truly destroyed and platter removal is the only option? (...)

That message means that you don't have a full version of WDMarvel, just the DEMO and because of that (DEMO LIMITATION) you can't write anything to the drive, including to the ROM modules.

Because of that you can't change HEAD MAP on ROM and you are getting that error autenticating to the server and getting VSC commands from the server (aparently).

Regards.

[Spildit]

I think that we are making it harder then it should be.

I can see two problems with our procedure.

1 - ROM on your donor PCB might be completly diferent from initial one (not just adaptives) and somehow incompatible with the SA code making it impossible to gain access to SA with that PCB.

Can you upload a photo of the donor PCB and the original PCB somewhere and post here ?

Also :

2 - PCB have EXTERNAL ROM CHIP, corret ? If so there are BIG CHANCES that there is NO COPY with valid data of ROM MODULES on SA and if there is a copy they will only be a "template" file without valid/correct data.

Normally only on drives without ROM chip (ROM embeded on MCU) you will get the valid data from the SA modules 102, 103, 105, 107 and 109 to generate the new ROM.

Please read this AceLab PC-3000 article :

http://blog.acelaboratory.com/pc-3000-f ... l-rom.html

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).

With that in mind and if you don't want to move the ROM chips from one PCB to the other i would :

1 - MAKE SURE that the donnor PCB is in working conditions and it's compatible with the original PCB. Also if the original PCB have a ROM chip the donor PCB must have a ROM chip as well, because if you move the ROM from your original PCB to the donor one and the donor doesn't have ROM then it will still read it's native ROM embeded on the MCU and not the ROM from the rom chip unless you mess up with some resistors on the PCB .... Or unlessyou write the ROM content to the embeded MCU ROM space and you can't do that as you can't read ROM on the damaged PCB.

2 - Move the ROM chip or use external programmer + SOIC 8 clip to write ROM :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=865

Hope this helps you out !

Regards.

[radekm]

Dear Spildit,

It's WDBUZG0010BBK-03. Seems like it's USB only in black plastic case.

best regards
Radek

[Spildit]

Dear Spildit,

It's WDBUZG0010BBK-03. Seems like it's USB only in black plastic case.

best regards
Radek

On that case i don't think WDMARVEL will be able to work with the drive, even in limited windows API mode.

Your best chance here is to convert to SATA.

Check the PCB number and use the table to find a matching SATA PCB :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1080

You might need to copy out the ROM content from the original PCB to the SATA one if the SATA ROM doesn't allow you to access SA to do the "patch" or the slow fix.

If you want to try something by USB the only option available that i know of is the HDDSuperTool as it can send VSC by USB (depending on the bridge chip) and patch module 02 and clear the RE-LO list (slow issue fix).

If all of this fails you can allways attempt to clone by USB but it will take ages, it will be near PIO speed and that is 100 GB-120 GB / day assuming there aren't bad sectors and you might kill the MCU on the PCB by forcing it to work with the RE-LO list on the RAM and processing it while attempting to process your data as well. Again if you do this there is no guarantee that your data will not be damaged/currupted as well.

Regards.

[Vlad]

i don't think WDMARVEL will be able to work with the drive

Yes, USB not supported
Only SATA/IDE

[Spildit]

I'm leaving here for reference only (and for other people with USB only drives) :

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1500

The OP @radekm solved this problem with HDDSuperTool.

Case closed.