WD Marvel Repair Tool

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

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.

_________________
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.

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.

_________________
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.

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




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.

_________________
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.

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.

_________________
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.

Yes, USB not supported
Only SATA/IDE

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.

_________________
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.

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

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...

_________________
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.