Question ST4000VNZ08 Controller board - no response

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Bart56

Oct 21, 2023
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My son's ST4000VNZ08 disk got wet, soaked really. he asked me to try to get it working about 2 years later. I took the controller board out and cleaned it with electronics cleaner and checked for visible signs of corrosion, cleaned any suspect lands. As a precaution to not spinning up the drive, I plugged just the controller into a USB adapter and plugged it in to see if it would be recognized by the computer. No such luck - nothing happens.
I checked the power fuses () ohm resistors and the ZT Diodes and all look ok.

I then decided that maybe the controller does not answerup if the drive is not attached, so I took a chance and pit it back in the drive and plugged it into the USB port. Same thing. The disk does not spin up (I can't hear it or feel it.)
So my question is, would a naked controller show up as an external drive to the CPU? And any thoughts why it is dead silent (besides dead)? I'm thinking the spindle is frozen but nothing heats up or hums.

This also happend to a Western Digital 3TB drie and acts the same way, bare controller does not answer up and the drive does not spin up when assembled. Will these drives work on a USB SATA adapter?

No Smoke, nothing is hot. Can someone shed some light on how to go about troubleshooting this? Is it worth trying a replacement controller?

Appreciate any advice you can share. Thanks.
 
fzabkar said:
After 2 years the PCBs would be badly corroded. But that's the easy part. If water got inside the HDA, then you should avoid spinning up the drive.
Click to expand...
Yes - thanks.
The PCB had minimal deposits on it and cleaned up well. But since I was hesitant to spin iup the disk at first try, I was hoping the PCB alone would announce itself when plugged into the USB adapter. I could assume since there was no response, the PCB is dead, but I don't have another PCB to plug in to see if it is recognized.
Thanks for the response. Much appreciated.
 
If you can upload photos of the PCB, I can at least show you the voltage test points.

If this is your PCB, you should see the Vcore and Vio voltages at the 3 inductors (2 x 1R0 and 1 x 3R3). Use any screw hole as your ground reference.

https://i.redd.it/q4kjbv8cb3l61.jpg

Seagate's drives have a UART port. If the MCU is not brain dead, you should see some output from this port. However, you will need a USB-TTL adaptor.

WARNING: You must not damage the 8-pin serial flash memory IC. If you do, data recovery will become extremely expensive, if not impossible.
 
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fzabkar said:
If you can upload photos of the PCB, I can at least show you the voltage test points.

If this is your PCB, you should see the Vcore and Vio voltages at the 3 inductors (2 x 1R0 and 1 x 3R3). Use any screw hole as your ground reference.

https://i.redd.it/q4kjbv8cb3l61.jpg

Seagate's drives have a UART port. If the MCU is not brain dead, you should see some output from this port. However, you will need a USB-TTL adaptor.

WARNING: You must not damage the 8-pin serial flash memory IC. If you do, data recovery will become extremely expensive, if not impossible.
Click to expand...
Yes that is my pcb. While measuring the board using a sabrent usb to SATA adapter, I don't see +12V coming from the adapter. 5v is on the board in several places. When I plug in my Kingston SSD to the Sabrent adapter, it works fine (but does not output 12V either from the adapter. I'm wondering if 12V is only present if the device calls for it. Any thoughts on that?

I have a photo of the PCB attached to the Sabrent adapter, but haven't been able to put in in here. I'll try to put it up on google drive if you think it's important.

I've seen your other post when you helped out with 6 blown out Seagate drives with blown 0 ohm resistors and that gave me info I needed to measure voltages.
Thanks so much for your help.

Update: after a bit of research, I see that the basic SATA adapters do not supply 12V that is needed with 3.5" disks so I need either a different adapter with a power supply or I can possibly hack a connector to this one to deliver 12V.

In response to your other point about water in the platters, do you think I could open them to check without making things worse?
 
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You must not open the drive. Even the tiniest speck of dust will cause the heads to crash on the platters. The heads fly on an air bearing whose thickness is less than the distance between two molecules of air.
 
@USAFRet - goal is to recover the data. Can't trust that drive any longer. The good news is that of the two drives my son sent me, (3TB and 4TB), the data on them was RAID 0 so the data is mirrored on both drives. I feel like I have some wiggle room to experiment.

Here is a link to the PCB photo with the SATA adapter attached:
https://imgur.com/a/BPbAX7N
View: https://imgur.com/a/BPbAX7N


Also, apparently, I need a SATA 3 type adapter to get 3.5" disks powered up correctly. I have had a Seagate GoFlex backup 1.5TB drive that is not recognized any longer but the base looks like a SATA 3 adapter. Since it doesn't work with the original disk, I don't expect it to work with this one. So I ordered another adapter for SATA 3.0 to USB and It should be here in a day or two. I'll see if it reads the original backup disk first to determine the GoFlex failure first. I'll update once I get it.
 
Bart56 said:
@USAFRet - goal is to recover the data. Can't trust that drive any longer. The good news is that of the two drives my son sent me, (3TB and 4TB), the data on them was RAID 0 so the data is mirrored on both drives. I feel like I have some wiggle room to experiment.
Click to expand...
RAID 0 is the total opposite of "mirror".
Recovery of a RAID 0 requires all drives to be present and functional, along with the original RAID controller.

Possibly you meant RAID 1?

But a RAID 1 with a 3TB and 4TB drive is....bad.
 
USAFRet said:
RAID 0 is the total opposite of "mirror".
Recovery of a RAID 0 requires all drives to be present and functional, along with the original RAID controller.

Possibly you meant RAID 1?

But a RAID 1 with a 3TB and 4TB drive is....bad.
Click to expand...
Yes - I meant RAID 1. I agree that dissimilar sized disks are asking for trouble...
 
fzabkar said:
Start by measuring the voltages at those same 3 inductors I mentioned previously. I expect you will find 1V, 1.8V and 2.5V or 3.3V.
Click to expand...
Sounds good - thanks @fzabkar - The inductors are only available with the PCB off the unit, but the voltages should be there when it is plugged in without the drive - right?
 
Update: with the new SATA 3 to USB interface, the PCB checked out fine, so I put it all together and since the other drive is a mirror, I decided to spin it up. I can see the USB drive in Windows. However, windows says it needs to be initialized. Since it is a mirrored RAID drive, I'm unsure what the format is supposed to be and if it can even be read stand alone. I'm going to look for some stand alone tools to try to peruse the drive in a RAW environment next.
 
Here are two images of the DMDE progress. After selecting the drive, DMDE proceeded to run full scan. It wet for a while but I came back to find this:
https://imgur.com/a/LLXrT9o
View: https://imgur.com/a/LLXrT9o


So not knowing anything (and help files do not describe errors), I hit abort. The screen then looked like this:
https://imgur.com/g1PneCF
View: https://imgur.com/g1PneCF


With that, further reading hinted at telling DMDE to create a RAID 1 but I'm unsure what this means. Will it try to mirror the disk into a 4Gb file on my filesystem?

Not sure what to do next.
 
It appears that DMDE is having difficulty accessing the drive. Moreover, DMDE should have found partition metadata in sectors 1 and 2, but it appears that there is some sort of corruption in this area. Are you sure that the two drives constitute a RAID? Please tell us that you have not written anything to the drive or attempted to initialise it.
 
fzabkar said:
It appears that DMDE is having difficulty accessing the drive. Moreover, DMDE should have found partition metadata in sectors 1 and 2, but it appears that there is some sort of corruption in this area. Are you sure that the two drives constitute a RAID? Please tell us that you have not written anything to the drive or attempted to initialise it.
Click to expand...
Correct - no attempts to initialize or write to the disk. i'm going to start up DMDE again to see how far it gets. It took quite a while of scanning until it got the error. I guess that's expected on a 4TB disk.

Something new: Disk2 just showed up in DiskMgmt console which wasn't there before.
https://imgur.com/a/R4TYlLd
View: https://imgur.com/a/R4TYlLd

Now maybe DMDE will work better - so I'm starting it up.
 
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fzabkar said:
Try to clone the drive while you can. HDDSuperClone is a tool that can deal with head/media problems.
Click to expand...
I've got to buy a 4TB drive first and another SATA adapter first. I'm thinking of trying one of the multi port SATA to USB devices that can also clone. Thoughts?

Here's what DMDE found the second time:
https://imgur.com/46cHPyV
View: https://imgur.com/46cHPyV


Thanks for all your help @fzabkar - you've stuck with me and guided me this far.
 
The partition metadata seem to be present now, but DMDE hasn't found any of the boot sectors. This suggests that they may be on the other drive, which in turn suggests that you may have a striped RAID, ie RAID 0.
 
fzabkar said:
The partition metadata seem to be present now, but DMDE hasn't found any of the boot sectors. This suggests that they may be on the other drive, which in turn suggests that you may have a striped RAID, ie RAID 0.
Click to expand...
I didn't know you could do raid 0 on only 2 disks, but I've asked my son to confirm raid 1. It's from a Synology DS220J NAS. That could mean I'd have to resurrect the other drive too in order to get the data from it. I haven't tried to cycle that WD30EFRX up yet.
Yikes! Risky business...

Turns out he's not sure if it was a Raid 0 or 1 (just texted me).

Do you think it is safe to eject and power this drive down while I take a peek at the WD drive?
Any thoughts on an off-line clone USB SATA 3 adapter?
 
Bart56 said:
I didn't know you could do raid 0 on only 2 disks, but I've asked my son to confirm raid 1. It's from a Synology DS220J NAS. That could mean I'd have to resurrect the other drive too in order to get the data from it. I haven't tried to cycle that WD30EFRX up yet.
Yikes! Risky business...

Turns out he's not sure if it was a Raid 0 or 1 (just texted me).

Do you think it is safe to eject and power this drive down while I take a peek at the WD drive?
Any thoughts on an off-line clone USB SATA 3 adapter?
Click to expand...
RAID 0 or 1 can be done with 2x drives.
All other types require more.
 
Cloning is preferable via SATA. If you try to clone via USB, the USB-SATA bridge will interfere with the error recovery process when a bad sector is encountered.

HDDSuperClone comes with a GUI and a Live CD. This should make it easier for first-time Linux users. Windows is unsuitable for cloning bad drives, either via SATA or USB, for the same reason as USB bridges.

OpenSuperClone is the latest fork of the HDDSuperClone project.
 
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