wd5000aajb

Seems I have a dodgy one of these. Did not last long at all. 16K power on hours is not acceptable as I expect disks to last over 40K hours.

Freezing the disk allows brief access which means the logic board is ■■■■.

Anybody got a service manual for the drive so I can attempt to repair the disk.

That document doesn’t exist.

I’m assuming this is your board:
http://www.htpcw.com/uploadfile/20110118155423687.jpg

If freezing the board rather than the whole drive is what gets it going, then I suspect the board will have a problem in the vicinity of the Marvell MCU (U5) or the preamp connection points (J1).

Oxidisation of the preamp connections is a common problem in those models affected by materials changes necessitated by RoHS. The solution is to lightly shine up the contacts with a soft pencil eraser. Alternatively, a cotton bud and metal polish such as Brasso may do the trick. I’ve used Brasso on other electronic jobs, but haven’t tried it on HDD PCBs.

A can of spray freeze should help you narrow down the problem if it is related to a specific component.

Your board uses a Marvell 88i6740-LFH1 MCU. FWIW, I know that WD’s “Tornado” family were afflicted with MCU faults whose symptoms mimicked head or media faults. Affected model numbers included WD5000AAKS, WD5000AAVS, WD3200AAJS, WD5000AAJS, WD5000KS. These had a Marvell 88i6745-TFJ1 or 88i6545-TFJ1 MCU. I suspect that the fault may have been in the read channel logic.

If you would like to measure the various onboard supply voltages (-5V, +3.3V, Vcore), I can help you locate the test points.

BTW, location U12 on the pictured PCB is vacant, so the “adaptive” data are stored within the MCU. This makes a board swap very difficult.

That said, you may be able to read the flash contents using one of the following utilities:
http://nazyura.hardw.net/000006.htm

These make use of WD’s Vendor Specific ATA Commands.

My HDD IC database may also help you:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_ICs.txt

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If I boot the test box with the drive attached Windows XP blue screens. I am using a VIA based PCI card with EIDE and SATA on it but even so the drive blue screens.

I have not yet got around to the CD version of WD diagnostics yet

Given the MCU is at fault, to say I am unhappy is true.

Tells me that the disk has borked design.