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Seagate 1.8T 2.4T 4T 8T 10T 12T 14T 16T HDD Head Replacement Tool is available with the Seagate HDD head comb suite.

The following are some of the supported Seagate HDD models:

ST16000NM001G, 16TB, STH9;
ST14000NM002G, 14TB, STH9;
ST12000NM0007, 12TB, STH82;
ST10000NM0478, 10TB, STH81;

ST8000NM000A, 8TB, ST5E;
ST8000NM0178, 8TB, ST3-4;
ST8000DM004, 8TB, ST334;
ST4000NM0035, 4TB, ST3-5;
ST4000DM004, 4TB, ST332;
ST4000LM024, 4TB, ST2-5

ST1800MM0129, 1.8T, ST2400MM0129, 2.4T, SST24(Seagate SAS HDD);
More…

Any question is welcome to [email protected] or add Dolphin Skype ID: dolphin.data.lab

This is one detected Western Digital patient hard drive. When the user tried to scan the data area, it was full of purple sectors which meant no data was accessible.

Next the user entered the COM terminal and got the following error messages:

Vio Mode=0,Voltage=1.8v,DFL

Boot 0x40M

SpinUp
FAIL Servo Op=0100 Resp=0003
0100 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
ResponseFrame 19C0 004E 04B0 3D00 0008 0000 0000 0000 0E98 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 38EA 7164 AF37 D066 296A 4F98 4C5F BB86 FFFF 0000 0004 891D FFAA 007F 001D 0004 0000 Loop=007F
FAIL Servo Op=0100 Resp=0003
0100 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
ResponseFrame 1DC0 004F 04B0 3D00 0008 0000 0000 0000 0E98 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 38EA 7164 AF37 D066 296A 4F98 4C5F BB86 FFFF 0000 0004 891D FFAC 007F 001D 0004 0000 Loop=007F^z

The user couldn’t enter F3 T> at all.

The user was then suggested to swap heads to continue the hdd repair. After head swap, the patient drive was detected and the data area was accessible. The user set up one disk image project, set up head map and finally imaged all heads by DFL-DDP data recovery software.

Here is the video introduction to above case.

Data recovery engineers can get good data recovery solutions from DFL-Samsung HDD firmware repair tool for Samsung patient hard drives with head failure.

Samsung hdd failure symptoms:

Clicking noises;
Not spining;
Busy;
Working slowly;
Undetected/wrongly detected.

HDD Repair tools and data recovery tools required to fix Samsung patient drives with head failure:

DFL-Samsung HDD firmware repair tool
DFL-DDP data recovery equipment

Data Recovery Solutions required to fix Samsung patient drives with head failure:

01: Head map editing in ROM;
02: Set up head map within DFL-DDP for imaging good heads first and then weak heads;
03: Swap heads by Samsung hdd head replacement tools within clean room.

Any question is welcome to [email protected] or add Dolphin Skype ID: dolphin.data.lab

Dolphin team have recently received many requests from existing Dolphin DFL users to expand their data recovery business to offer physical hard drive data recovery services.

When the hard drives are physically damaged, such as stuck motor, head stiction, heads’ physical damage, platter scratches, weak heads or downgraded platter surfaces(many physical bad sectors), contaminated heads or surfaces, etc, when the patient drives have any failures above, the cases cannot be fixed online by remote support and users must have hands-on experience to open the patient drives in clean room environment to swap heads, swap platters, clean surfaces, clean hdd inner areas, adjust platter alignment, etc.

The following are the best physical hard drive head replacement tools for your clean room data recovery success:

01: Dolphin Head and Platter Swap and Clean Suite.Pro;
02: Hard Drive Ramp Toolkit Pro.;
03: Dolphin Scratched Head Comb Suite 001;
04: HDD Platter Swap and Clean Workstation Smart;
05: Seagate LM Slim HDD Head Comb Suite.Advanced;
06: WD Slim HDD Head Comb Suite.Advanced;
07: WD Slim HDD Motor Release Smart;
08: Seagate Head Comb For 7200.11 and 7200.12;
09: Donor Hard Drive Sourcing Book For Head Swap

Many Dolphin users have some of above head replacement tools, users can check to have one complete set and for new users, please email to [email protected] or add Dolphin Skype ID: dolphin.data.lab to get the best quote.

The following error messages are output in one Seagate ST4000LM024 patient hard drive COM terminal and this indicates the patient HDD has head damage and users need to use the head replacement tools included in the Hard Drive Ramp Toolkit Pro.

Boot 0x80M
MD0044
0001
FAIL Servo Op=0100 Resp=0007 Read more

According to one investigation from users in over 100 countries, the level 2 head comb suite has become the most cost-effective and top-rated head replacement toolkit in 2015.

Level 2 head comb suite has contained 27 different head combs to support different hard drive brands of Seagate, WD, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu, SATA, IDE, USB, SAS drives of both laptop and desktop whose heads park on a ramp are supported. Read more

Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


When users are going to replace heads or platters in a clean room environment to get the lost data back, it’s a must for these users to learn about each physical component what it is and how they work.

Today let’s check some of the most important physical components: Heads, Platters, PCB.

The platters contains the data and the heads contains read heads and write heads to read data from platters and write data to the platters. PCB is another very important physical component, it contains not only some of the firmware codes like ROM, but also controls the electrical components to offer power to the hard drive running. Read more

Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


When we are talking about dead hard drives, we usually refer to those which doesn’t spin up at all, no hdd working sounds, no response and they look dead. Actually some of these so-called dead hard drives are still alive and these drives can be still repaired and recovered.

If the driver IC is burnt, the PCB won’t power up at all, users can swap with one donor driver IC or swap the whole PCB with original ROM/bios chip transferred;

If the PCB is burnt or other electrical components of hard drives are burnt, the hard drives won’t be powered on and won’t spin up at all. At this time, users just need to find one compatible PCB with the same PCB number from the same family and put on the dead hard drives and then manage to regenerate the original ROM to recover the data;

If the motor of the dead hard drives is stuck, users need to disassemble the hard drives and remove the platters to a donor hard drive to read data from.

Read more

Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


We have recently received many inquiries asking to buy the head and platter swap tools from Dolphin Data Lab and some of them asked one question-is clean room a must for physical head replacement and platter swap?

According to our experience and many serious data recovery companies, the answer is definitely ‘yes’!

First, we must say data recovery is one serious art, to have one clean room or at least one clean bench will definitely maximize the physical data recovery success rate. To have one clean room or clean bench to handle the physically damaged hard drives such as head damaged hard drives, motor stuck hard drives or downgraded heads without r/w capabilities. Read more

Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


Physical head and platter swap is one of the most common data recovery cases and so far in the data recovery field, this kind of case is not for all data recovery engineers due to its complexity and requirement.

The key to get high success rate of head replacement and platter swap is continuing practice and learning from others’ experience;

To work on head and platter swap cases, users need firstly one clean room environment;

When users are swapping heads, users need to understand the hard drives with bad heads requiring data recovery from are usually called source drives or patient drives, the hard drives with matching good heads are usually called donor hard drives; Read more