WD Passport WD5000BMVV-11GNWS0

[vrocco]

So I am working on WD Passport USB drive and I'm 99% sure I'm gonna have to do a headswap at some point. Drive spins up and sounds like it tries to seek the SA, but usually doesn't come ready or even identify. However, it will occasionally identify correctly on the Atola for just a moment and then it stops responding. Since it's a USB drive, I can't do much with the Atola. I unfortunately don't have a DDI or PC-3000 just yet.

I'm wondering if you think it's worth converting to SATA to see if I can image any of the heads before attempting the headswap? I hate to pull heads before I read everything that the good heads still can. There's also the chance that if only one head is bad, I can get enough for a decent recovery without a headswap. I also hate to do the work to switch to SATA and not be able to get anything at all.

Or have I mis-diagnosed this and it's some other problem that you guys have seen. I'll admit, I'm fairly new to this.

Any help at all is appreciated.

 

[pclab]

Yeah, swapping to a SATA PCB, you will get more "power" to work with the drive.
Give it a shot.

 

[Jared]

I totally agree with PCLab, you will likely find that the drive is much more stable over SATA. For drives that occasionally come ready you can often hot start them by disabling all the heads except for either 0 or 1 (whichever seems to be reading the SA better) and then soft reset, set the map back to normal, soft reset again and try imaging.

Though I don't know if you can do this on Atola, I don't own one...

 

[vrocco]

Thanks for the advice guys. A quick followup:

With these drives, do you find it easier to switch the ROM to a compatible SATA board, or to solder a SATA header onto the existing board. I wasn't 100% sure if swapping the ROM to a SATA board would give me problems with the encryption (I'm assuming this Passport has encryption??)

 

[Jared]

You'll have to deal with the encryption either way. I find that transferring the ROM is far easier than trying to solder on a SATA port (don't think I ever successfully did that). If you had PC-3000 we could walk you through digitally reading/writing the ROM using a terminal connection. I never have to do any solder work on them these days.

In most cases you can find a USB bridge board from a My Book that uses the same encryption chip as the Passport PCB.

 

[Jared]

If you take a nice high resolution picture of the chips near the USB port, I may be able to tell you which USB bridge to use. I have a pile of them here that I've collected.

 

[vrocco]

I'll try and do that when I get back to the office Jared. I'm out running around right now. Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.

 

[vrocco]

I unfortunately can't get a good picture in high resolution with the crappy camera I have. Which chip or combination of chips would tell me what you need to know?

 

[vrocco]

The controller chip right by the USB port says:

initio
INIC-1607E
C11
E51202113
1040

 

[Jared]

Yep, that's the chip to match. When I get in the office this afternoon I'll look to see which board has the correct chip. Unless someone else beats me to it.

Also be sure you image to the end of the drive. There's a sector near the very end that contains the encryption key which the My Book bridge will need to be able to decrypt. And be sure that after you clone, you set the max LBA of the destination drive to be the same as the original (as shown via the SATA board not as shown over USB) of it is different.