FAIL Servo Op=0100 Resp=0003 Fix

FAIL Servo Op=0100 Resp=0003 or similar error messages output in the COM terminal become now more and more common error message for new Seagate F3 hard drives especially the DM series we have seen.

Mostly these error messages come with some noises or after several seconds, the hard drives spin down, this is because the SA was not read at all and above 90% cases are caused by head damage, the head 0 or head 1 is very possible to have been damaged.

The seagate DM cases with this error are very risky and costly for data recovery engineers, many engineers may invest a lot on donors to get more data off the platters. To fix these drives, users can boot with PCB only, access to level 2 command and use Z to stop motor, put back the HDA and then use U command in the terminal to start motor and then find out if the patient hard drive keeps clicking or not, spin down or not. Sometimes if it spins fine, users may try to edit head map in RAM or use selective head image to image the good heads. For full data recovery, the only choice is to swap the heads.

As suggestions from Dolphin clean room engineers, we don’t suggest users to try the above procedures to recover the data, our suggestion are to protect the source maximally when you get this message, treat it as one head damaged case very properly and carefully, minimize the times of powering on it and never treat it and operate on it like how you work on pure firmware damaged cases, like you go to terminal, running different familiar commands, such as clear glist, smart, M commands, etc. You don’t need to do all of these before you swap the heads and make sure no second or permanent physical damage to the patient drive is created by your wrong steps to handle such drives.

Many data recovery engineers have reported to us they handled these cases with big cost and some are even losing their data forever due to severe scratches. We must say these kind of Seagate drives are really expensive ones.

Error Messages Examples For users to keep an eye on:

FAIL Servo Op=008F Resp=0003
ResponseFrame 0000 0000 0000 0000 8055 C8A1 8055 C8A1 8006 C881 8069 C8A1 8165 C8A1 0000 0000 0010
RECOV Servo Op=0055 Resp=0005
FAIL Servo Op=008F Resp=0003

FAIL Servo Op=0100 Resp=0007
ResponseFrame FFFF 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 FFFF
FAIL Servo Op=0100 Resp=0007
ResponseFrame 2EA0 0603 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

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