Can anyone help with advice for this drive.

This drive came in as a no spin. We managed to find a donor drive a close a match as possible WD800JD-08LSA0. We backed up the mods off the donor drive. We then swapped PCB's and uploaded mod 11 to the data recovery drive. This drive now comes ready and we can see all details such as S/N, LBA, Firmware, SPT. We can also scan the mods which are all good. what we cannot do is gain access to the DA of the drive. We get read errors on all sectors.
We have followed all the advice received from Salvation data, they now say there is no more they can advise, so try to get advice on forum.
Reply:
This should be a simple case of swap the ROM on the donor drive with the old ROM. No firmware uploads are needed.

It sounds like you've got a bad translator. Can Salvation fix it? PC3000 can.

Jon
Reply:
what did u got on ATA registers? IDNF;ABRT ?

Like jono said, looks like translator corruption, did u check SA structure?
Reply:
Thanks for your replies,

We have checked all the modules with Salvation data and they are all okay. Jono you mentioned using original rom from original PCB, did you mean physically swap or by using salvation data to download rom and upload to new PCB.
We have only had salvation data for approx two months and in that time we have not been able to confirm their download and upload rom part of the software actually works.
Reply:
ROM programming in lieu of physical ROM replacement is perfectly fine. I don't doubt Salvation's ability to reprogram the ROM. Use of the wrong ROM has different symptoms than you describe.

Again . . . can the Salvation tool regenerate the translator?

Jon
Reply:
We uploaded the original ROM to a donor PCB and now that PCB does not spin the drive (Just as the original PCB did not spin the drive).

I asked Salvationdata about a translator regenerator and they pointed me towards the HDD Rebuild command. It is not clear what this did but it took a few seconds (maybe 30) and said complete but the drive was still exactly the same.

Sometimes the software uses different words for processes but I don't know if they allow regenerating the translator. Is the translator just a module in the SA or is it more than that?

John.

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