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Hot Swap is one traditional and universal method which can be often used for data
recovery from different hard drives.
Hot swap is used when you are trying to fix the damaged SA modules but if the drive
cannot write to the System Area to fix corrupted modules.
Firmware corruption on modern hard drives usually occurs when one or more
modules are damaged in the System Area on the disk platters. Fixing this type of
problem requires specialized utilities to test and repair corrupted modules. Usually,
the repair can be done using professional hdd repair tools, and it doesn't require any
extra steps to perform.
Sometimes, however, some modules cant be fixed. This could be due to the
following reasons:
1, There is media damage in the System Area, so heads cannot write in that area;
2, There is some damage to system heads write elements, so heads cannot write at
all;
3, Modules containing unique write parameters for the heads (adaptives) are
corrupted, so the drive cannot write;
4, The hard drive doesn't give access to System Area if some critical modules are
corrupted;
5, If some modules cant be fixed, the solution is to use the Hot Swap method to
access the drive System Area and try to repair the modules.
A Hot Swap procedure generally follows these steps:
1, Use a matching donor drive, enter the specialized utility, and make sure that the
drive is in working condition;
2, Put the donor drive into Standby mode using a special command from within the
utility. This command makes the drive spin down the motor without cutting power to
the drive.
3, Carefully hot-swap the board by disconnecting it from the good donor drive and
connecting it to the bad drive. Even though the drive is not spinning, the board is still
alive.
4, Wake up the drive by executing Recalibrate or another ATA command; if the donor
drive was compatible enough, the bad patient drive should spin up and become
ready;
the donor and patient drives are not compatible. In cases a) and b), most likely the
adaptives are not close enough, and in cases c) and d) the translator tables are
different, so after being initialized with the donor translator, the drive seeks for the
data in the wrong place on the patient drive.
The Smart Hot Swap method gets around these limitations.
How to do a Smart Hot Swap and get more data
For a Smart Hot Swap, you prepare a donor drive that is identical to the bad drive
firmware-wise and then use that donor for a Hot Swap to read the data from the bad
drive without fixing it.
WD HDD hot swap. For a donor HDD to do hot swap, it requires the same firmware
version and same head map contents. For complete data recovery, an identical
translator is required too.
Firmware version and head map can be easily fulfilled by selection of an appropriate
donor drive. Here they are: the donor drive must be a similar model of the same
family (the MDL line on HDA case must match), it must use a compatible firmware
version and the same head map (it can be verified by reading ROM in Kernel mode).
The PCB of the target drive must function normally on the donor HDA.
For an identical translator, it cannot be fulfilled by plain selection as there are no two
drives with the same P-List tables and, consequently, with identically translators.
Therefore, if you need to recover data using HOT-SWAP, you should perform two
steps:
Step 1, based on the firmware version and head map, select a donor HDD and
perform the first HOT-SWAP during which you should test the firmware modules. In
particular, you must verify the integrity of the translator modules or P-List table.
Then these translator modules must be copied to the donor drive (remember to
preserve a backup copy of the original donor modules). If the translator modules are
corrupted, overwrite the P-List module and Regenerate translator using P-List.
Step 2, Use the donor thus prepared to perform the second HOT-SWAP after which
you can attempt recovery of user data with the help of data recovery tools.