Hi Luke!,

It's my understanding that once a sector shows those patterns you mention, the original data in those affected sectors is overwritten with gargabge permanantly. Have you found this to be the case?

Interesting. Do you have any more info on corestorage anywhere on the forum?
A search for corestorage only brought up this article.

I guess i could have done that. I've never done it that way. You mean just visually look at the order and write that configuration to the ROM? I ended up swapping the ROM and was able to get FULL & correct ID. I was also able to get about a million sequential sectors imaged and it was reading ex...

it's saying my image of 603k is too large for this forum.

its at the bottom here.
http://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopi ... 158&t=9749

Im going to try to swap that strange looking large ROM.

There's a large U2 with a chip number M29F102BB. (1 MBIT (64KB X16, BOOT BLOCK) SINGLE SUPPLY FLASH MEMORY)
There's a 8 pin U8 with a chip number ST755 9224.
There's a U1 with a chip number L6278 1.2.

I actually don't think ROM is not unique in the old Caviar drives.

Hi everybody! Client swapped PCB on this drive because the original was dead. It spins up fine now. I don't see any ROM chip on this board. The 8 pin chip seems to be an inverting switch-mode regulator. Job was at another lab in the US. PC3K cannot see or detect the family of this drive so I don't t...

Nice find. Excellent job at figuring this one out.

Yeah, in the Best Buy in my neck of the woods they open it up just to move the "needle", just in case its stuck. Even if it's clicking . Lucky me

Charge an open drive fee and techs and DIY people will eventually stop doing this silliness. Word will eventually get around that's it's not to be opened and poked at. I tell all my clients to give Best Buy a bad google review and berate the manager on the phone for allowing techs to open their driv...