Samsung Hot Swap Guide

Samsung hot swap is one common and important  method to repair samsung damaged hard drives.  In order to perform one Samsung head swap, you need to find one donor samsung hard drive with donor PCB. TO be a donor drive, the head map and model number require to be the same.

The following are the reference steps for Samsung hotswap:

Step 1: Power on donor. Run the hdd repair tool which support hotswap. Wait until initialization will complete,then put drive to sleep mode;(You can use pc3000 udma)

Step 2: Unscrew the PCB from donor and install it on patient drive. Screw the screws back. And perform recalibration;

Step 3: Wait until the drive will enter ready state, then read the modules from the drive except some "big capacity" log modules;

Step 4: Power off donor PCB and swap it on donor HDA;

Step 5: Write all necessary modules(Look the list below) from patient to donor drive .Then switch drive's Power off/on;

Step 6:  Press Sleep and Swap the PCB from donor drive to patient HDA;

Step 7:  Screw all the screws and do the recalibration. The patient drive is "hot-swapped", try to access the data on it.

Modules for those families V11P, VICTOR, PUMA, VICTORPLUS, VERNA, VERNALITE:

"UNITABLE"

"SLISTHDR" (except V11P & VICTOR)

"SLIST"

"TLIST"

"ALIST"

Modules for those families PALO, PANGO, VANGOPLUS, VELOCE, RUBICON, P80A, P80M, DELPHI, POSEIDON, CAESAR:

"06 CONFIG"

"10 SLISTHDR"

"11 SLIST"

"12 TLIST"

"13 ALIST"

"5D CONFIG2" (if it exist in modules table)

"62 ALISTHDR" (except PANGO, VANGOPLUS, VELOCE, RUBICON, P80A)

Modules for those TRIDENT, T166(S), STORM2(S166), TRIDENT3(S250):

"05 SRVTBL"

"06 CONFIG"

"0C ARCOTBL"

"0D GEO_TBL"

"10 SLISTHDR"

"11 SLIST"

"12 TLIST"

"13 ALIST"

"17 SRVTBL2"

"18 ARCOTBL2"

"62 ALISTHDR"

"6E 10SOFS"

"71 VFY_PATT"

"80 SCT_DATA"

"9B HSC_RST"

"9C FOD_NRRO"

"9D FOD_HSC"

"9E HSC_DT"

"9F HSC_RST"

"A0 FOD_NRRO"

"A1 FOD_HSC"

"A2 HSC_DT"

"A3 HSC_CYL"

"A4 IN_SITU"

"A7 FOD_HRLR"

"B3 AVSCAN"

For 2.5 Samsung Mango family

After all modules except "OVERLAY" were copied from patient to donor drive and a hot-swap was done - the drive come to ready state and the access to customer data was achieved.

We were using pc3000 UDMA with this method for Samsung hdd repair with high success rate. Read more data recovery tips or get more information about free data recovery tools and solutions on Data Recovery Salon.