Problem with WD Marvel Demo

[ianc]

Hi Vlad,

Thanks for the offer of the key, I'm PM'ing you my email address. I would love to license your product if it meant I could recover this data! Thanks!

Hi Spildit,

Thanks for your long and considered response. Here is a little more info for you; I have two of these failed drives which were both damaged during the power surge. They are both Dell-branded WD 1 TB Enterprise drives, and their firmware version and build date (stamped on label) are the same.

I purchased a donor PCB from http://www.hddzone.com/, and checked the serial #'s as directed on their site before purchase. Hddzone guarantees these boards are tested and working at the time of sale, although I guess I have only their word on this... These boards do not have the U12 chip; the firmware is embedded in the MCU. Here is a pic of the three boards:



I can post more pics of the boards for you to compare if you'd like, but I'm hoping this will at least establish that the boards are similar enough for our purposes.

I did read your Acelab article, and I think I followed the gist of it; initially the board's firmware was not similar enough to the drive's to enable the SA to be read, but the writer of the article flashed the PCB's firmware to a version closer to that originally used by the damaged drive and was then able to read the SA so he could recreate the ROM from the SA and restore the drive to functionality.

Is that a process that could be done with the WD Marvel repair tool, or would it require the PC3000 board? I guess the trial key Vlad sends will enable us to find whether at least one of the heads is good. I guess if not, we don't really have a shot?

Thanks again for your advice!

Ian

[Spildit]

I can see several problems with this ....

The donor PCB doesn't have any ROM on it so you can't just swap the ROM chip to the board, it will not work because the PCB will still read the embeded ROM on MCU, like it happened here on this case that I've solved by having the client shipping the drive to me - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=915 . On this case i've used an extrenal eeprom programmer + soic 8 clip to read the patient PCB and write the correct ROM back to the drive with WDR (you can do the same with WDMarvel). The main issue is that you should READ the ROM on the damaged PCBs first, and if you can't do that then you can't procede this way.

Also your SA on platters will most likely NOT HAVE a copy of the required data to regenerate the ROM as you can read on the PC-3000 article. This is because your drive have EXTERNAL ROM chip.

The way to go would be either to read the ROM on the patient drives by the use of something like this - http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=865 and write it back to the donor PCB using WDMarvel or you can as well attempt to READ ROM by PVS mode (Kernel mode). This is done by removing the PCB from the drive (the bad one) power it up connected to power and SATA and use WDMarvel to detect the drive and read ROM with the PCB connected only. Of course if the "damaged" PCBs are completly toasted or the TVS/Fuses are shorted/opened then this will not work at all...

[Spildit]

Oh ... even if you use WDMarvel to "flash" a "close" ROM to gain access to SA, and assuming the head stack + pre-amp are fully functional then you would still have the big issue related to the fact that on SA there will be no initialized modules with valid data to regenerate the ROM.

Not to mention that most likely the ROM chip will be bigger in size of data that it can take then the internal MCU on the donor PCB. With that in mind you would have to start by dumping the ROM on the donnor PCB, check it's size and when you were to write to that donor PCB again the data inside the patient ROM chips you will have to cut the ROM size (on the patient ROM) to fit the internal MCU ROM size. Of course that this will have to be done with an hex editor and you must make sure that the sizes of the ROM images will fully match.

You can start by placing the donor PCB on the drive, power it up and check if WDMARVEL can read it's ROM.

If yes please compress the ROM with RAR or ZIP and post the file here.

[Spildit]

Where do you live ?

If you send me in the 2 damaged PCBs i can DUMP the ROM out of it and send the files back to you so you can write them back on the donor PCB using WDMARVEL.

Of course you will have to pay the shipping costs to Portugal - Europe and you will have to pay the shipping costs of the PCBs back to you if you want them returned.

Or as alternative you can buy another PCB from someone who supplies adaptation service.

Or you can send me the boards and i will copy the ROM from the damaged boards to the donor ones free of charge (as long as you pay for shipping).

Also you can use the services of a reputable data recovery firm near you, but make sure it's not just a regular computer repair shop.

This of course, assuming that the drive will work with the ROM transference and that the drive doesn't have other problems like damaged heads or pre-amp ...

If you want to do-it-yourself the best course of action would be to retrieve the data from those 2 ROM chips (of the damaged drives) using an extrenal programmer and write them in the correct format/size to the donnor PCB using WDMarvel or any other WD firmware tool...

[ianc]

Hello Gentlemen,

Vlad, I received the key you PM'ed me and installed it, then followed your advice to try first head 0, then head 1 to try to access the SA modules. In both cases, the result was as before:

"Error reading module dir, state - SERVO_ERROR_CODE_BASE_SvirActSync"

So it looks like WDMarvel cannot access the modules on the drive's SA. I'm not clear on why this is:

1) The drive's hardware is damaged such that the platters cannot be read, or
2) The firmware on the donor PCB is not close enough to the original to be able to access the drive's SA.

I then followed Splildit's advice and hooked up the two damaged PCB's to the machine and tried to detect them with WDMarvel. Unfortunately, I was not successful with this attempt either, receiving a 'The drive is not defined' error both times:



Spildit, I live in the US, but I would be quite happy to ship you the PCB's (& drives), pay for their return and give you something for your time as well, but it seems to me that we ought to first try to determine whether the drive's hardware is damaged or not so we'll know if we have a reasonable chance of success. Is this possible?

You also mention in one of your posts that you'd like to look at the donor PCB's ROM. I was (I believe) able to extract the donor ROM. I have posted it here:

https://app.box.com/shared/static/12bsc ... k8cvws.bin

You will require a password to download it, which I will PM you. It is only 192 KB in size.

As usual, thanks very much for your kind efforts!

Ian

[Spildit]

Hello again.

Your ROM file is OK :

1.jpg (46.87 KiB) Viewed 17613 times

This means that WDMarvel was able to READ the ROM from your Donor PCB.

Also your Donor PCB have a 192 KB of size as expected. This is because it's embeded ROM. There are some chances that the ROM size of the ROM image extracted from the ROM chip to be bigger, normally 256 KB and on that case the end of the image have to be "stripped" to fit the size of the internal masked ROM if you are going to re-use the donor PCB.

- Does the drive produces clicking sounds or spinning down ? Can you ear the actuator moving at all ? In any case i would attempt a PCB swap with direct ROM copy to avoid uncertain related to PCBs with non-native ROM.

I don't know if WDMarvel can detect PCB only in PSV (kernel) mode. Will have to test it myself later. But then again if the drive doesn't spin at all with those 2 damaged PCBs then most likely there is significant damage to them. If it were just a TVS the computer power supply would shut itself down because there would be a short on the power line to ground caused by the burned TVS/diode.

If you ship me the 2 damaged PCBs the price of shipping would be way less then the price of shipping the entire drive and i can dump the contents of ROM to you, strip it down to 192 KB and you can then write it back on your PCB with WDMarvel (same way you could read from it) and test it out.

Apart from that you can try to check pre-amp for shorts or damage. Do you have a multimeter with you ? Regards.

[Spildit]

This requires a "trick".

If i detect the PCB only with WDMarvel (on my HRT card) i only get DRQ. Because the PCB is NOT READY i can't detect it neither soft-reset it and all that i get is the message saying "the drive is not defined".

1.jpg (90.74 KiB) Viewed 17609 times

Let's do a "trick". Go to "other" - S.M.A.R.T. and VIEW S.M.A.R.T

Press "Soft-Reset" !!!

2.jpg (78.52 KiB) Viewed 17609 times

PCB will report ERROR but will go to Drive Seek Complete and Ready.

Issue the DETECT !

The PCB will show the ROM info.

Now you can READ ROM as the PCB will be READY !

3.jpg (99.23 KiB) Viewed 17609 times

Please do note that this WILL NOT WORK if your PCB is completly damaged/gone.

MOST LIKELY WILL NOT WORK IN SATA/AHCI MODE !!!! You might need PIO.

[Vlad]

SERVO_ERROR_CODE_BASE_SvirActSync
I think commutator is die

[ianc]

Hi Spildit,

I'll try this trick on both of my damaged boards tonite and let you know the results. The drive does click as the machine is starting up, but once Windows has booted, it stops. It does not spin down either.

Hope you are wrong Vlad...

Ian

[Spildit]

There is indeed a BIG chance that the pre-amp is damaged ...

But it doesn't hurt to try with the correct ROM and see if the drive works again ...