West digital wd3200avjs hard drive is wacko!

[kobra000]

Hello guys..i am new to this forum so if placed this thread in the wrong place..please tell me and i will do my best to correct it

my problem

I recently rescued a WD3200AVJS (western digital) hard drive from the pit of doom (local landfill).the other day
and upon placing it in my computer some strange things happen
1.the bios "detects it,but all its information is 0's..everything! everything youd expect to see under say Vendor,model number serial number,LBA,Type of drive etc etc...its all 0s...so thats telling me that the BIos is seeing something on the SATA1 port..it just doesnt know what it is.
2. it will not reveal itself under windows Vista or XP or Ubuntu 12.10..nothing shows up at all.

so i did some research and found that this drive is common to DVR and whatnot made by companies like Dish and Direct. and i also found that alot of these drives are commonly put into PUIS mode..Power up In standby..which i guess works for a DVR but does crap for PC users. So with more searching i found a program that would allow me to turn this feature off..(HDAT2 using the W/switch).and VIOLA it did indeed help alot..the bios was able to see it and all of its information and it even revealed itself in Disk management under windows Vista.
But..somewhere along the lines it started disappearing from disk management here and there when i would go to format it.also one of its other problems was it would misreport it size..its a 320gig hard drive but disk management would only see it as a 297.8 gig hard drive (thats alot of gigs to loose!)
so,i figured that PUIS or some other power management feature was popping up and shutting the drive off intermittently .so i went back in under HDAT2 hard drive utility prgram but found there was very little i could do (or understand) to shut any kind of power management features off..I did however find two sections that explored
1 was Automatic offline
and the other was HPA (host protected area)

i had figured perhaps there was a hidden reserve partition on the drive that was hiding all those left over gigs that seemed to be lost under windows management..so i set the feature to "remove" and under the automatic offline i set it to disabled.
but upon rebooting..the same ole same ole happen..nothing in bios,and nothing in windows..but now a new set of problems! now when i bring up HDAT2..it only sees it as a "PCI DEVICE" and offers no information on it such as vendor or model number or serial number or any other juicy bits of information. and not matter what i try it allows no commands to perform at all..
my question to you is could of changing these simple features been the cause of messing it up? (ive read about others removing HPA and having no ill effects...not much info on disabled automatic offline out there)
or
has the firmware somehow been corrupted? and if so how can i go about reloading the firmware when the drive and computer are not getting along to well and the computer cant tell what kinda drive it is?

the bios of my computer still sees it..but in its "dumb mode" where everything is all zeros,and when i reboot up into the HDAT2 program..it still sees it as "PCI device".


any and all help and all information is greatly appreciated.

thank you very much

Keith.

 

[scout_03]

the 320 formated drive gave you the aexact amount of space available on the drive,use the dld tool from wd to test the drive http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=607&lang=en this is the drive you got .

 

[nukemaster]

Ok a few things. The drive may have been dumped for a reason.

PUIS can actually be set on some drives with a jumper, but that is another story, not many boards support it.

Your size was PERFECT

driver makers list drives in a base 10 number vs a binary friendly number.

So 320 * 1000(megabyte) * 1000(kilobyte) * 1000(byte) = the number of bytes on the drive.

320000000000 bytes

Now we need to get that number to a binary friendly number(what computers use).

320000000000 /1024(kilobyte) /1024(megabyte) /1024(gigabyte)

298.0232238769531 gigabytes

Seems right in the ballpark to me.

You may hard hurt the firmware messing with it. I am not sure how you would recover to be honest. Just wanted to add some info you may find useful in the future.

 

[kobra000]

yep that is the drive i have...and i have been scouring the net for a firmware update for this but to no avail...id did find some nice tools out there that im going to give a go ..but in all honesty do you think this drive is toast?

 

[kobra000]

i did notice that when HDAT2 goes through its detect (its detecting everything in my system) it says the following:
pci interrupt routing rev. 1.0
> bad checksum
Pnpp bios 1.0
system management bios (smbios) ver 2.5
Desktop management interface (dmi) vers 0.0

could the problem lay with my bios?

one thing i know is that darn PUIS is still on..thats keeping the bios from seeing it correctly..(all my research for the last 10 days has pointed to that being the culprit of why the bios wont correctly identify it. that and the jumper being on the PW2 pins..which mine is not..people this forum,the HDAT2 forum and other forums with exact same drives and exact same misdetection problem)
but im at a wall on how to turn if off if programs like MHDD and HDAT2 wont see it as a normal sata device (MHDD wont see it at all,actually the only thing that program sees is my DVD writer).
'ive been poking around in it tonight and did manage to find out out that some features like HPA,DCO and Security have all been disabled,and under DEVICE INFO under the udat2 program it will list it as a hard drive..but just not the type.(but for some reason its seeing my IDE DVD burner as a SATA drive.

Does anyone know of a program that i could manually enter information into to reset the drives parameters? the only program i have found is SCSI sandbox,but they do not offer a freeware version and it starts at 5,000 dollars!
also found a nifty Western digital HDD firmware repair tool (http://www.datarecoverytools4u.com/product/new-wd-firmware-repair-hardware-dfl-wdii/) but its like 600 bucks as well.
im not entirely sure the firmware has crapped out..i think i just kinda nocked it funny and got it looking in the wrong direction.

again any and all information and help is greatly appreciated.

thanks

Keith.

 

[kobra000]

Question. if DCO was turned off or disabled..would it result in the problems I've been having? cause i read the following on Wikipedia

"""the system uses the IDENTIFY_DEVICE command to determine the supported features of a given hard drive, but the DCO can report to this command that supported features are nonexistent or that the drive is smaller than it actually is."""

i do remember messing around in the DCO area and think i may have disabled it or removed it..if so is there anyway of turning it back on? is there anyway to brute force command the drive?

thanks

keith

 

[fzabkar]

hddguru

 

[kobra000]

that sight didnt help much at all..There program MHDD wont even detect the drive as a PCI device like HDAT2 will..HDTA2 is half way seeing it it shows it as 0 bytes and as "PCI DEVICE"..but i dont know why.

i have it pretty much narrowed down that i "double locked" the drive by first turning off DCO and HPA ( I remember HPA had said it was using the drives entire native size of 320gig,so there were no sections hidden or missing as far as i know.) and i believe turning DCO off took away my SATA and ATA commands, and i guess somehow i turned PUIS back on so now that the drive wont spin up the command to turn it off cant be registered. (once again the drive says HPA,DCO and SECURITY are disabled...but i have no clue how to turn them back on without the command set features being there!)

is there any way of access a drive through windows and manually doing all this? i found one SCSI toolbox but its 550 bucks!!!!..thats ridiculous..there has to be something similar thats less or free..



Keith.

 

[nukemaster]

I am sorry to say, It may be almost impossible to get it back.

I know it sucks, but on the plus side, since it was a recovered drive, at least it should not have cost much if anything.

Go find another one

Just remember the drives gigabytes is in base 10 vs the way a computer sees it.

So 1000mb = 1 gigabyte to a hard drive maker, but that is only 931 as far as windows sees it. So it had no reserved areas

 

[fzabkar]

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:hddguru.com+puis