HDD won't spin - Tried replacing PCB

[Slycer]

Hi,


there are some serious experts on this board and I've learned a lot by reading fzabkars posts. Hope he sees this thread and chimes in. A month ago three of my drives failed. Five were running. A SSD survived along with a SATA drive, WD 20EFRX. I lost two Samsung HD204UIs and a WD 20EFRX. I don't know what happened. Drives were on mixed power leads so it couldn't have just been a power spike on one cable.

At this point in time I'm really only trying to save the WD 20EFRX. It contains all my study data, 10 years worth of photos, bank certificates and other things I accumulated over the years. Really, it's everything I care about in digital form.

The thing is that the drive will not spin up. I have ordered a replacement PCB from hdd-parts and swapped the BIOS chip. Well I had it swapped. Still NOTHING. If I plug the drive into the PC, it detects it in BIOS. When I started looking into things a month ago before I ordered the PCB I even downloaded a linux distro with hard drive tools and somehow, I have no idea how with the drive not spinning, I was able to BROWSE the drive. Every folder, every file was there. Since replacing the bios I only tested if it's still detected in BIOS and it is. Haven't yet tried to browse the contents again. Of course I wanted to copy the data the moment I saw I was able to browse the contents but I got an error. Probably expected since the drive wasn't spinning.

Does anyone have any idea what I could try doing to get the drive working? I am seriously desperate.


Thanks to anyone in advance.

 

[Slycer]

This is the only way I get an echo. Without this setting turned to "Force on" anything I write stays there, no echo.

To elaborate, right now I'm still testing the TTL. I have the RX and TX pins connected with one cable. Local echo set to "Force on" and each letter that I type is echoed back to me.

 

[Slycer]

I have no idea if I did the echo test correctly. I moved on though cause I'm a bit impatient. This is how I connected everything (click to enlarge):



Putty settings:

Bits per second - 57600 Bits per second - 57600
Data bits - 8 Data bits - 8
Parity - None Parity - None
Stop Bits - 1 Stop Bits - 1
Flow Control - Hardware Flow Control - None

Connected the cables like this:

[''''''''PWR'''''''''] ['''SATA'''] [ : : : | ] RX / TX


I get nothing in Putty. Blank screen.

 

[fzabkar]

ISTM that you are connecting the drive correctly. You should see some input from the drive as it powers up.

The only problem I can think of is in relation to the signal levels, but that hasn't affected others to any great extent. At worst they have experienced the occasional garbled characters.

 

[Slycer]

What is the correct procedure?

1. plug USB TTL into PC.
2. connect to USB TTL via Putty
3. Connect RX and TX lead to Hard drive (reversed from RX TX on USB TTL)
4. Connect 12V power to HDD

Is this it? Could it be that the wiring schematic for the hard drive is wrong? The schematic has 4 columns of pins, I only have 2.

 

[Slycer]

I'd love to test the thing on one of the WD drives that I know are working. But can't find any wiring schematics or putty input settings.

 

[Slycer]

Okay... So I connected the external SATA thing as I should if I were connecting an external drive... Which means that I also connected it to a USB port. And something came up in putty..

I think you are going to like this:

Last line before S_0ENG.. It's the infamous U.

Here is the power up sequence for a HM321HI drive when PUIS is disabled:
=========================================================================
Here is the same drive when PUIS is enabled:
=========================================================================
*PA VID=0007 PN=0000 Rev=0004
*PA VID=0007 PN=0000 Rev=0004
ChipRev = 63B0
U
S_0ENG>
=========================================================================

BTW, HDAT2 is able to disable PUIS for this model (after launching it with the /w switch).

This is it though. I don't get the long readout like the one in your post for that HM321HI.

 

[Slycer]

One more thing, which pin on the hard drive is gound? it seems to work without a grounding wire from the USB TTL to the hard drive though. Should I try to connect it anyway?

Just to give you an idea of how this is now connected to get that output:

It's a "Digitius adapter cable set". It's for connecting drives externally. A crude usb dock. When I only used its power plug, the drive gave up nothing. When I also connected the SATA data cable to the Digitus adapter and plugged this adapter into an USB power, then I got the readout you see in my previous post.

Now that we see that the drive has PUIS enabled (I am reading this correctly, right?), what do we do? I've already tried with HDAT2. I just get this:

 

[fzabkar]

AFAIK, Samsung drives need to detect a SATA host before they will spin up. That's why you need to connect the SATA data cable.

Your terminal log is consistent with PUIS enabled. The long log is what you get when the drive spins up, ie PUIS disabled.

HDAT2 cannot talk to your drive via USB. Could that be what you are doing wrong?

 

[Slycer]

When I did that HDAT2 thing it was connected via internal SATA cables. Legacy mode off. With Legacy mode on HDAT detected nothing at all.

Video, with legacy mode ON: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwcUdU7hjO4

I tried connecting the other Samsung HD204UI drive. I get a bit more data.

And the last two lines just repeat to infinity. DIPM TMOUT and SATA TMOUT.

 

[Slycer]

Nevermind this, I think it's just an error because of the way I connected all the wires to the hard drive. I was able to replicate it on the first hard drive.

 

[fzabkar]

Type "SU" to spin up the drive, then try HDAT2 again.

Samsung Terminal Commands:
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=682&p=4740

 

[Slycer]

I write SU and hit Enter. Goes to a blank new line and nothing happens. Hit Esc and it says "*** Break at 0x1001D868 [8000.00.00] then new line and DBG>. And I can't return to ENG with GO as I get anoter "Break at ...".

DV works, returns firmwarre version... BD works under DBG says no breakpoints... But can't get much more out of it.

Contacted Seagate to explore all options:

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.
I understand you want to know if there a way to issue a command to disable PUIS via the terminal for your seagate hard drive.
Unfortunately, that function is not modifiable on this drive and i do apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you.

Dumb customer service answer or is it really possible that PUIS can't be turned off?

 

[fzabkar]

Seagate Support probably don't understand what PUIS means. In fact PUIS is a feature of the ATA standard and is supported by most drives, including Seagate's own.

That said, I'm aware of one WD model that had a PUIS bug which would prevent PUIS being disabled after it had been enabled. The drive could still be made to spin up under Linux or HDAT2, though.

I wouldn't play with the terminal commands because some of them may be data destructive.

If you have access to a spare PCB, then I would try to spin up one of your drives with that. Note that the PUIS flag would be written to the "ROM" on the PCB, so the usual requirement for a ROM transfer from patient to donor would not apply in this case (because it would transfer the problem to the donor).

If I were approaching this problem, I would read the ROM chip (8-pin serial flash memory) and determine the location of the PUIS flag byte. You may be able to read the drive's firmware with the following tool.

SHT - Samsung HDD Tool Free Edition (DEMO):
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?f=149&t=1084&p=4937

Please don't ask me anything about it because I haven't used it.

 

[Slycer]

I'm about to go to bed but I'm trying to run the SHT program. It's giving me a load of missing OCX files popups. I'm downloading them one by one but I don't know if this is what I shgould be doing.

I copied all the pcx files and now the program opens. I set all the COM settings. Conencted to the serial device. But no data was transfered. So I tried to do what I do when I connect with putty. I unplug and replug the 12v power lead. In Putty that outputs the info that I already pasted. In SHT it crashes the program.

 

[fzabkar]

Sorry, I'm out of ideas. I suggest you join the HDD Oracle forum. Perhaps "Spildit" will have some insight into your problem.

 

[Slycer]

Okay. A sincere thank you for all your help fzabkar. You really took your time and taught me quite a bit. We rescued one drive, hope Spildit can help me with the other two. He seems interested in the case so I have some hope.