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[ 33 posts ] Go to page 1, 2 Next Print viewPrevious topic | Next topic AuthorMessageOld Tech Post subject: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 6th, 2016, 21:20

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63I am wondering what tools are best these days for examining/repairing the surface, if that can be done, and possibly the drive hardware. I have read that some apps can attempt to revitalize the surface by adjusting the write current.

I am working on an old Maxtor 6Y080L0 80 gig drive, just for fun. It is showing read errors around LBA 25,300,000 and there are enough to force chkdsk into a long session.

I have removed all recoverable files from other partitions and reformatted the disk using the Powermax low-level format utility. I re-formatted and added the C: and D: partitions, Chkdsk /r found no problems on C: but has been stuck on D: for over a day, now at 70%. The thing bother me there is that I know the area it is working on is good.

I have a backup for partitions C: and d:, with Win XP on D:. The bad sectors are near the 13 gig mark, putting them in the middle of my XP partition.

The drive boots fine and is recognized by the boot sequence. Powermax has given an error of Y2V SY2.

I know the Maxtor uses a table inside the drive ROM, or on the disk itself, to adjust motor speed and seeking. Is it possible that the bad sectors in one area of the drive could be related to a corrupted drive table?

Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 6th, 2016, 22:16

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalHello there !

First of all you can't repair the surface of a drive. If the surface have defects and/or the heads are failing then it's time to replace the drive.

If you have expensive firmware tools (or even less expensive ones as long as they support your drive) you can sometimes disable a damaged head (and prevent the use of a bad head/platter) or run the factory self-scans to attempt to retrieve more life out of the dying drive, but of course this is not recommended. You should just replace the drive. Also you can't fix drive "hardware" with software tools.

If your goal is to "test" the HDD then you can read here - Testing hard disks with some confidence :

Regarding your old MAXTOR drive, your drive should be a CALYPSO one and as most of the MAXTOR families they fail allot in particular with firmware/translator problems (apart from the usual bad heads, etc...)

CHKDSK is NOT a good tool to test your hard drive. You should try to run a MHDD or Victoria SCAN and see if you can verify the totality of the drive and if not you should check the behavior of the scan. If you can scan a huge amount of sectors without any problem and you are only having problems starting at LBA 25 300 000 then you can assume that all heads are "reading" at least to some degree. You can then check if you can read sectors past the "damaged" area or if you can't read anything at all up till the end of the drive. You might have a scratch or patch of bad sectors on a particular section of the platter or you can have a bad translator module (VERY FREQUENT TO HAPPEN ON MAXTOR).

It is indeed possible that a bad translator table (on drive service area) could cause those apparent bad blocks. You have an example of that here - viewtopic.php?t=33182 - but it can also be caused by bad media, scratches, etc...

Further diagnostic would be necessary but because you do already have your data (and you formatted the drive) it would be pointless now unless you have tools to work out with the drive firmware and/or you want to learn how drives work.

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Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 6th, 2016, 22:40

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalAs reference on MAXTOR drives the translator sub-system (that translates LBA to internal drive phisical C/H/S location) uses modules U_List, AT_PDL and RZTBL.

The HDD forms the translator based on the defect lists and the translator can be regenerated using a translator regeneration command (most maxtor firmware tools will support this). Even if you damage the translator tables as long as you have the original defect lists you should be ok.

Expensive firmware tools like PC-3000 or MRT have options to work with MAXTOR translator sub-system and fix it if necessary. You can also use chinese cheap alternatives like SD tools. As a matter of fact Salvation Data Maxtor tool should be just fine(for what other people say as i don't have it).

This of course assuming that the patch of sectors that you can't read are caused by translator issues at firmware level and not by physical damage on the platter.

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Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 6th, 2016, 22:54

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalJust to ilustrate what i was saying the firmware modules of a MAXTOR drive stored on the PLATTER looks like something like this :

Attachment:

1.jpg [ 98.13 KiB | Viewed 18548 times ]

I've just taken the screen shot using one of my test drives. This one in particular is a 40 GB N40P MAXTOR but it should provide you with an idea of how modules on a MAXTOR looks like.

Also any decent firmware tool that support MAXTOR drives will have a facility to automaticly fix translator problems by re-generating the mentioned tables/modules using the unique information stored on the drive defect lists.

Example on my test drive :

Attachment:

2.jpg [ 80.9 KiB | Viewed 18548 times ]

You can learn more about the translator sub system on my site here :

Translator, Defect Lists and Bad Sectors :

Understanding translator "shifts" :

Again this is assuming the platters are not damaged and the issues that you are experimenting are only firmware related.

Best regards and happy learning.

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Top Old Tech Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 6th, 2016, 23:00

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63Spildit wrote:Hello there !

First of all you can't repair the surface of a drive. If the surface have defects and/or the heads are failing then it's time to replace the drive.

Thanks for reply.

I understand and I agree. I have written the drive off and I am working with it only out of curiosity. I am learning a lot going through this exercise.

However, this drive is responding in such a way that I suspect what you said below about firmware/translator problems and/or a bad translator table. At first, I thought it might be a bad partition table but when I ran MHDD it began showing a lot of read errors around LBA 25,300,000 and they eventually caused it to freeze for a long time. I had to terminate the app.

As you say, that is most likely surface defects but it could also indicate a bad translator table or firmware problems.

Another clue. I had several other FAT32 partitions after D:. I had an E:, F:, G: and H:. Drive E: was a small 4 gig swap file partition. F: was readable and I was able to remove all folders and files from it to an external drive. Same with H:. Partition G: was reading fine then suddenly it became unreadable with CRC errors. When I looked at the partition only the first sector was bad.

That's really suspicious and does not sound like a random surface defect. It sounded more like a corrupted partition table, Fat32 table, or a translator issue.

I don't think a bad head is an issue since it can read drive: C fine.

The only reason I ran chkdsk /r was to see if it would mark the bad sectors as bad. If it did, I was going to try building partitions around the bad partition area and hide the partition.

As far as scratches are concerned, I took a drive apart many years ago to see if the heads had landed and scratched the surface. There was not a thing to see. In the old days, I saw the effect of a head crash and it was very apparent.

Top Old Tech Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 6th, 2016, 23:06

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63[quote="Spildit"]As reference on MAXTOR drives the translator sub-system (that translates LBA to internal drive phisical C/H/S location) uses modules U_List, AT_PDL and RZTBL.

Thanks for all the information. I'll need time to absorb it.

Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 6th, 2016, 23:23

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalSure ... More testing with special (expensive) tools would be required to figure out what the problem is with the drive.

As I told already translator problems are very frequent on Maxtor drives because the translator sub-system is used often during the drive normal work and on MAXTOR those tables tend to get damaged very often.

Another typical maxtor firmware problem is when the drive only IDs by family name (like CALYPSO on your case) without correct model and for those cases you have to set jumpers on the drive to safe mode so it will not load SA to RAM from the copies on the drive, load to the drive RAM the necessary CPs and code to start the drive up from external firmware (using what is called a "Loader") and then attempt to either create a native loader or repair the damaged firmware and extract the data. This is when some modules that are critical to the normal start up of the drive sustain damage and it's very usual on MAXTOR drives as well.

At any rate i don't think that you would be willing to buy a PC-3000 unit ($6000 USD) or a MRT unit ($3000 USD) to fix the translator of just one drive. And if the drive were to have data it would justify to send it to a data recovery firm for data extraction but i don't think it would be reasonable to attempt a fix and pay for it because the price would be higher then the price of a new drive and eventualy it would fail very soon once again ...

Salvation Data Maxtor doctor would cost about $600 USD (they have an offer now for half the price) but even so it would be very expensive to fix just one drive.

You might get away with free or pirated tools but up until now i've never saw anyone reporting sucess using those "shaddy" tools, on the contrary. For example for MAXTOR there is a free software to manipulate firmware called HDD Repair 2.0 but all the people that i know that have tried to use that ended up with completly dead drive, so .... don't say that i didn't warn you !

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Top Old Tech Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 7th, 2016, 2:52

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63Spildit wrote:You might get away with free or pirated tools but up until now i've never saw anyone reporting sucess using those "shaddy" tools, on the contrary. For example for MAXTOR there is a free software to manipulate firmware called HDD Repair 2.0 but all the people that i know that have tried to use that ended up with completly dead drive, so .... don't say that i didn't warn you !

You might notice from my profile that I joined in 2006. Back then I really got into it, going so far as to learn basic Russian. All the good stuff about drives was in Russian. The hardest part was translating Russian slang for drive terminology into English.

I have forgotten most of what I learned but it should come back fast enough. I downloaded a Maxtor manual from this site, which is in Russian, but it has been copy-protected and I can't copy the Russian and put it into Google translator.

I have been an electronics technician and a computer technician for a long time and I have thought about building my own interface, like the PC3000 and writing my own software to communicate with the drive. It would help if someone had already started such a project.

I don't think the interface would be that complex but it might be tougher getting the in-house code the manufacturers use in their BIOS. That could be interrogated using modern debuggers and I know there are many such files floating around.

Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 7th, 2016, 12:40

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalWell, building the interface shouldn't be a huge problem. The chalenge would be to figure out Vendor Specific Commands to send to the drive and execute special functions and gain access to firmare Modules/CPs, etc.

You can buy cheap tools for each drive maker and attempt to figure out what commands are issued to the drives and how do they work.

Manuals for tools like PC-3000 can help you out if you already have some sort of a working firmware tool and you need to learn how to use it.

Without the software itself you can't debugg it to figure out how it works.

Even if you learn how to use the standard ATA commands you will still need to know the Vendor Specific Commands that are unique for each brand and sometimes they will vary even from drive family to drive family.

You might want to start by reading some research on VSC like the following :

Tutorial: Using MHDD to send ATA commands to a HDD :

Fujitsu 3.5 MPx Firmware Research :

Hitachi 2.5 Buffer RAM experimentation :

Quantum Firmware Research :

TOSHIBA 2,5 MKxxxxGAS Firmware Research :

IBM Deskstar "AVV2" Firmware Research :

"Playing" with ATA passwords and HRT ATA Terminal :

Regards and good luck !

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Top Old Tech Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 7th, 2016, 21:49

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63Spildit wrote:You might want to start by reading some research on VSC like the following :

Thank you kindly for your help and links, Spildit. Very helpful and much appreciated.

I waited till chkdsk had finished it's scan. It was very slow, taking 3 1/2 hours for each 5% of the disk.

It revealed that my formatting was 32K/cluster and it flagged 8 gigs as bad. I am wondering if that means 8 gigs of clusters (allocation units) or 8 gigs measured in sectors.

I reformatted to 4096 sectors/cluster presuming it would be much easier for sector recovery programs to work with the smaller cluster size. NTFS seems to prefer that size anyway. I am using a Hiren's boot disk which has Victoria on it but not MHDD. I have MHDD on a boot CD but it means rebooting to load it. Victoria indicated a large number of bad sector after LBA 32000000.

I have reduced the size of my d: partition to 16 GB, before the errors begin, and after running chkdsk on that, it ran through with no problem. No errors. I am going to try reloading my C: partition, which is a 4 GB with Win98 and my D: drive which has Win XP on it.

Problem is, my D: partition image is 20 gigs so I'm going to try reducing the image size to under 16G.

There's no practical purpose in this other than getting access to disk drive utilities I have on partition C: Also, I have a newer desktop with a fairly recent Intel mobo running XP SP3 which has a spare IDA connector. If I slave the bad Maxtor on the IDA connector I have many utilities on the XP desktop I can use.

Hiren's runs in a ramdisk and I'm hoping my XP with a dual core Intel processor will run faster.

Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 7th, 2016, 22:33

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalOk then.

Good luck and let us know if you manage to make any progress with your drive repairs.

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Top Old Tech Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 8th, 2016, 1:23

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63Spildit wrote:Ok then. Good luck and let us know if you manage to make any progress with your drive repairs.

Just one more question. I have another Maxtor 6Y080LO that works. It's a YAR41BW0, If I could find a way to extract the required tables from the good drive, can I swap them with the bad drive?

I know there are rules but I forget the criterion for what each drive needs to have in common.

Top jermy Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 8th, 2016, 8:21

Joined: March 19th, 2015, 15:01

Posts: 1413

Location: isrealOld Tech wrote:If I could find a way to extract the required tables from the good drive, can I swap them with the bad drive?

You want to transfer the translator from one drive to another ?

Did I understand your question properly ?

Top data-medics Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 8th, 2016, 9:43

Joined: April 3rd, 2011, 0:19

Posts: 2020

Location: Providence, RIOld Tech wrote:I have been an electronics technician and a computer technician for a long time and I have thought about building my own interface, like the PC3000 and writing my own software to communicate with the drive. It would help if someone had already started such a project.

I think you are vastly simplifying this task in your own mind. Before you should even consider trying to make your own tool, you'd need to spend about ten years working with an existing tool so you actually have some clue as to what these tools do and how complex they are. Then you'd need to study several different fields of programming and engineering. Then you'd need to either spend the next two hundred years reverse engineering every vendor specific command for every hard drive out there or find someone willing to just openly share all this (no one will, they've got too much invested in it).

There is a reason it takes an entire team of engineers and programmers in Russia to produce a tool like PC-3000. To think that one "old tech" is going to pull it off by himself is either pomp or just ignorance.

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Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 8th, 2016, 14:54

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalOld Tech wrote:Spildit wrote:Ok then. Good luck and let us know if you manage to make any progress with your drive repairs.

Just one more question. I have another Maxtor 6Y080LO that works. It's a YAR41BW0, If I could find a way to extract the required tables from the good drive, can I swap them with the bad drive?

I know there are rules but I forget the criterion for what each drive needs to have in common.

Please do read my article about translator here - =46&t=1402 . It should answer your question.

Simple answer - NO

Translator is UNIQUE to the drive.

When a platter is done at factory it will have DEFECTS. When they produce 2 or 3 platters even if they are done one after the other all of them will have DEFECTS on diferent places of the platter.

As example let's check my MAXTOR again :

Attachment:

1.png [ 50.86 KiB | Viewed 18322 times ]

Now you can't just use the defective spots on the platter so those places are stored on a Defect List - PRIMARY defect list or P-List at factory on a test done to the drive (by the drive itself) called a Self-Scan :

Attachment:

2.jpg [ 38.25 KiB | Viewed 18322 times ]

Now when the drive "makes" the tables that will link the external requests for reading/writting to an LBA (Logic Block Adress) to the specific place on the platter the Defective spots on the platter can't be used and so the next available place will be used instead. So because that each platter will have it's own defects each defect table for each drive will be unique for that drive and because you have to jump over defects when translating LBA to internal physical C/H/S translator tables will be unique for the drive as well.

If i were to check some LBAs to internal C/H/S on my specific MAXTOR drive i would see something like this :

Attachment:

3.jpg [ 67.95 KiB | Viewed 18322 times ]

When i request to access to LBA 214 i will end up at internal sector 214 but when i request access to LBA 215 i will end up at internal sector 217. This is because internal sector 215 and 216 are placed on the P-List because the factory Self-Scan marked those places at platter as BAD :

Attachment:

4.jpg [ 12.94 KiB | Viewed 18322 times ]

So if you were to use the translator tables from another drive because the defects and translators are diferent you would end up loosing access to data because of shift points as explained on my article and you could end up requesting for one LBA and end up on a bad spot or the drive could think that one spot was bad when in fact it was not, etc ...

So it's pointless to move those translator tables or defect lists from one drive to the other.

What can be done is to generate the tables again based on the defect lists or if you don't need the data on the drive you can as well run the factory Self-Scan on the drive (with special firmware tools) and get the surface scaned for defects and have those defects added to the P-List and have a translator done that account for those defects.

Most of the data recovery tools / firmware tools that would allow you to move the lists would also allow you to re-gen translator and run Self-Scan.

Regards.

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Top Old Tech Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 9th, 2016, 20:56

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63data-medics wrote:I think you are vastly simplifying this task in your own mind. Before you should even consider trying to make your own tool, you'd need to spend about ten years working with an existing tool so you actually have some clue as to what these tools do and how complex they are. Then you'd need to study several different fields of programming and engineering. Then you'd need to either spend the next two hundred years reverse engineering every vendor specific command for every hard drive out there or find someone willing to just openly share all this (no one will, they've got too much invested in it).

You have misunderstood my questions, they are unrelated. The question about downloading tables from a good, similar drive and uploading to a bad, similar drive was discussed back in the 2006 - 2008 era with someone who was doing it.

I have also traced the entire circuit of a hard drive and I have no difficulty understanding what is going on in the circuit. Back in the old days of computers, in the late 1970's and '80s, I used to replace heads in the field and re-align them using a special disk that had a track dedicated to a signal that could be seen on an oscilliscope. You aligned the heads by watching the amplitude and vertical evenness of the signal.

Mind you, disks only had 1000 tracks per inch in those days and that would be virtually impossible today.

As far as your claim that I am being pompous and ignorant, makes me think you are over-rating the complexity of the electronics and the reverse engineering. I took a look at the HRT board and I find the layout to be modest and very simple. Mind you, I have been working with computers at the hardware level since the 1970s, when processors were made with discrete transistors and hard drives were 18 inches in diameter and held only 5 megabytes of data.

With regard to reverse engineering.... far, far more complex coding has been cracked from manufacturers who were intentionally obfuscating code to protect it and using every imaginable trick to hide it. What they did not count on is that people exist who can do what you claim they cannot.

The hard drive manufacturers have no intention of hiding their codes and not much of it can be stored on the chips on hard drives. Applications can have several megabytes of code to wade through because it is written using a high level language. There is no high level language associated with hard drive code and they don't have the luxury of using extra code to obfuscate their code.

It may take years and years to decipher every code for every hard drive ever made but I am looking only at a Maxtor and there is a lot of information already available on the net for them. As I said, if I do this, it will be for sheer enjoyment, not to go into business.

It is a matter of finding a way to interrogate the chips to retrieve the data then relate that to the hard drive itself. That requires more dogged patience than brilliance.

I have been into reverse engineering for a couple of decades. I never do it for malicious purposes...I never crack a program and release it to the Net. I do it for pleasure, like doing a giant crossword puzzle.

I have reverse engineered a directx program where the mouse input and display is replaced by code from the directX environment. Therefore you cannot access the Windows code directly. That's why in games the screen goes full screen and the mouse cursor appears differently. They belong to the directx code, not the Windows code.

I reversed it by hooking the mouse code and following it back through the Windows system code to where it was connecting to the Windows code. That is infinitely more complex than trying to reverse engineer Assembly code related to a hard drive.

Top Old Tech Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 9th, 2016, 21:22

Joined: March 9th, 2006, 19:01

Posts: 63Spildit wrote:Please do read my article about translator here - =46&t=1402 . It should answer your question.

Sorry...I should have stated my question better. I was not talking about translator tables. There are files that can be exchanged between good drives and bad drives if both drives are the same.

Back in the 2006 - 2008 era I was into deep discussions with someone about reviving a hard drive that would not even boot properly. We discussed taking information from a good drive and transferring it to the bad drive.

My memory is foggy but I have extensive notes somewhere that I need to review.

I did visit your site and I was reading a thread on the HRT board.

There was a suggestion that you add a free-wheeling diode to the relay on the board. If the power inputs to the relay coil are isolated from the rest of the circuits on the board, there would be no need for such a diode at 12 volts. There are MOVs used on such boards anyway to absorb transient spikes.

There are only two major chips on your board, both microprocessors. Building that unit would be dead simple electronically, the complexity being the design and mounting of the components.

With regard to the daughter board, it was suggested it is for licensing. Therefore it is what we call a dongle. Every dongle I know of in the real world has been bypassed. The early PC3000 had a dongle that was bypassed.

I don't know why certain manufacturers still insist on such stupid protection. It's used extensively in the music world where software manufacturers use hardware dongles and software protection that can interfere with the rest of your applications. They can even crash your system.

One writer was lamenting that his friend had software that had been cracked to remove the protection yet he was using the purchased product and having headaches over the side effects of the protection software, which kept freezing his app and the entire computer.

It's about greed. The PC-3000 could be purchased at one time in Russia cheaply but a manufacturer in the US got the rights and started charging $10,000. I see they are now down to about $4500.

It's still way too much money. You can buy sound cards that are far more sophisticated and they sell for a few hundred dollars.

I'll build my own if I need one. As another poster claimed, it is beyond someone like me. Let him live in his delusion.

Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 9th, 2016, 22:06

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalWell, you wouldn't even need the CARD itself as long as your software can send the VSC (vendor specific commands) to the drive to the the work.

The hardware card is used for protection/license and to handle I/O better from the disk to the software/card without having BIOS/OS messing with the drive at the same time, preventing system from hanging when a bad drive is plugged, power off/on drive if needed, etc ... But you can live without the hardware card and still gain access to the drive firmware.

Tools like SeDiv don't have hardware at all and will work with firmware of all brands of drives. Cost is about $700 for the entire product, more or less.

MRT is more or less half the price of PC3K and have a card as well. PC3K with Data Extractor should cost about $6000 depending where you live, but for maxtor only a SD tool should cost less then $300 now (with 50% discount).

If you check for example WDMarvel tool for WD drives or SGT for Samsung drives they don't use hardware cards at all. It's just the software. Same for china HDD products like the famous WDR for western digital. They also have a MAXTOR tool.

That MAXTOR tool that they have is a RIPP OFF (complete RIPP OFF) of the KrogrHDD Utility. They didn't even change the ICON of of tool neither the design of it and claim it their own tool. No wonder they are out of business.

The majority of firmware tools are based on code of other tools. Even PC3k shares code with other tools either because they grabed that info from others or because others grabbed it from them.

If you have a PC3K and something like hardware IDE sniffer you can run the tool and sniff the VSC.

If you are very good at programming you might be able to make your own tool in just some days.

There was a user (Louis) ofthis forum that was able to do his own WD tool by reversing the code of WDR. WDR by itself is a ripp off HRT 5 Marvel tool.

The dificult part would be to gain access to the vendor specific commands without buying a tool to reverse.

Regarding the HRT daughter board it works as a license to know what tools you aquired from BVG.

Unlike other pack of tools like SeDiv, pc-3000, MRT, etc that will have a tool for every brand (Maxtor, WD, Seagate, etc), HRT 3.0 and 5.0 was sold either as a full pack (all tools + data extractor that they call Data Recovery Edition) or you could buy just the card and the tools that you wanted. You could buy for example just a WD tool for WDC_xA drives and a tool for WDC_xB and a tool for WD_Marvel based and the Maxtor, etc ... You would get a "key" when you send the $$$ to the BVG to aquire the tool. Then you would activate the tool by inserting the code and that tool would start to work on your card.

What is really cool about that is that you could just buy the tools that you needed at a very cheap price, the license are activated on the card only and are not locked to the PC like PC3K - You can move HRT cards from one PC to the other and it will work just fine unlick PC-3000 that needs hardware activation and if you wanted to upgrade from HRT 3.0 (PIO) to the 5.0 (UDMA) you could just buy the cheap UDMA card and move your license board to the UDMA card. All your 3.0 licenses would work on the 5.0 software/card as well. Meaning if you have the maxtor tool on the 3.0 card and you move the license card to the 5.0 board the Maxtor 5.0 tool will work on that card as well.

As for MAXTOR tools you can check HDD Repair 2.0 but most likely it will kill your drive.

There might be easy to find on the net pirated versions of the China HDD Union MRT tool for maxtor. That tool is exactly the same KrogrHDD Utility but without the Fujitsu and WD tools and the settings pannel. Both those tools will work without any hardware. You just connect your Maxtor to your motherboard and you are done with it.

If you want to inverst some $$$ the Salvation Data tool have an hardware box to connect the drive to it and should be cheap now that they are selling at half the price. You can look for used units as well.

MRT Pro tool is a full complex (sort of ripped off PC-3000) just compare the 2 of them and you will see .... At any rate MRT have a modality of "activation" on-line that you can aquire the use for 30 days and "charge" it (by paying) when you need it.

Apart from that all the tools are buggy and all the tools somehow have bugs on the same aspects of the code that the other tools have ...

Coincidence ?

For example, Let's say that great and mighty PC3K have a problem retrieving 3 Code Pages from a Toshiba drive. Let's say that on 50 CPs PC3K get's the size wrong for x, y and z CP. All the others are ok. If you go and dump CPs using for example SeDiv on the same Toshiba model you get the same 3 CPs with incorrect size.

If tools were to be developed without relying on the other tools or at least in the information regarding the firmware boundries and size of CP/Modules then this wouldn't happen, but for this to happen there is no doubth that tools are been reversed by others to make their own tools.

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Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 9th, 2016, 22:11

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalRegarding modules of drives you can copy some modules from other drives from the same family and firmware version and sometimes you can even disregard FW version.

If the modules are not exctusive for the drive like a defect table or translator module you can copy from a working drive a module to fix a damaged drive, for example on WD drives a 02 module can be copied and edited from drive to drive. It's the way used by some tools for example to hack drives to work on game consoles like XBox or to change serial number of drives and/or make one drive looks like it is from another brand/model, etc ...

There are modules that you can even clear as the drive will not need them for working like self scan logs and tests.

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Top Spildit Post subject: Re: need advice on current toolsPosted: September 10th, 2016, 0:12

Joined: December 19th, 2006, 8:49

Posts: 11050

Location: PortugalOh .... I forgot to add ...

The other problem with building the interface yourself is the fact that even if you were able to duplicate one of those cards (HRT, PC3K, MRT, whatever) you wouldn't have the software to "flash" the main ROMs of the card and you wouldn't have the software to interact with the card and most important send the VSC to the drives to work with them at firmware level.

You would allways need to either get some working firmware tool and reverse it or sniff it's traffic otherwise you would need to reverse the drive firmware by yourself using something like JTag, get the ROM, reverse the ROM, access to the modules on platters, reverse them, etc ...

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