A few days ago my WD20NPVX 2TB drive reported a SMART error due to Reallocated Sector Count hitting a threshold value.
I thought the idea behind the SMART error served as a warning and you should replace it asap.
I guess my thinking was wrong as the drive stopped responding right after SMART getting bad
While no tools were able to access the drive, I was able to see the sector contents with Active@ disk editor although the drive responded extremely slow.
Although most important data is on backup drives I wanted to make a copy of the drive anyway and at the same time learn a bit about the technique behind it.
The drive originally came in a USB case, I removed it and connected it directly to the mainboards sata interface.
I then tried a couple of recovery tools to read an image or clone the drive. All the 'regular' commercial recovery software fails to properly connect.
Since sectors can be read out, I figured this just means it is not the right software.
After some reading on the forum here I then tried the HDDLive image.
The first attempt gave < 0,1mb/s read speed which meant a 10 month dump process.
After some more reading I did the slowfix 02 and tried again. It now started with 0.6mb/s read speed.
After slowfix 32 things started to look better. It now got ~10mb/s read speed.
So I let it run for a day after which it errored out. The error was caused by the fact that the source drive moved from /dev/sda to /dev/sdd.
After reconnecting the drives I got them in the proper order again and continued the dump.
I loaded the log in HDDSCviewer and it shows some kind of pattern that seems to indicate that the drive stops responding after every x period.
I attached a screenshot.
Has anyone seen this before, anyone know what or why this is happening?
Any tips?
In any case, thanks for taking the time to read my post.
~V.