Hi everyone,

A friend of mine had a problem with his Hitachi HDP725050GLA360. The drive spins but clicks every two seconds before giving up everything after one or two minutes. Of course, it keeps on spinning and is undetected by the BIOS.

I decided to look for the same drive (P/N: 0A35415; MLC: BA2831). I succeeded.

I put donor's PCB on the dead drive but the only difference was that it did not click anymore. Totally deceived, I put back the PCBs to its 'original' drive. I put that dead drive in my USB dock, switched it on and... Surprise: a kind of life appeared and OSX told me that drive format was not recognized.

Then, I put the 'new' drive in an external case and started a copy with the 'dd' command line tool. It was really slow (1.7 Gb/hour; USB is what it is) and I gave up after a while. I took an old PC; I mounted both drives on it in order to do the same operation with Linux. Both drives were found by the BIOS. But, seen that I began copy, both partitions tables were identical and, so, I was not sure of source and destination. I switched the PC off; I disconnected the sick drive and deleted partition from the clean one.

When I connected the sick drive again, BIOS did not find it anymore. Everything fall back to the initial situation. Of course, I tried many times to exchange the PCBs those last 24 hours without any surprise coming back.

I have the feeling that something is still possible. Would anyone have any advise ? Many thanks in advance !

Hi,

Is your data valuable?

Hi dmarques,

Yes, highly. Otherwise, I would not spend so much time on that "mission".

My patience paid ! The lovely 'dd' tool is working since a few minutes. I hope that there will not be any data corruption.

Here is what my last attempt was. I plugged both disks on the PC. I removed PCB from the sick drive. I switched the PC on, then off when it was about to boot. I put back the PCB on its drive. I turned the PC on and the BIOS discovered everything.

I don't know if that makes sense; it seemed hazardous to me. I will see the results in a few hours.

Thanks for your interest !

Ok.
Sometimes it could be any temperatura related problem, or failing heads.

The heads should be failing. I wanted to run SpinRite to check readability. It sometimes spend more time on a sector than usual. I finally gave up, because I do not want to take the risk to reach the "end of life" of the drive.

I am just a starter in this domain. My first case was a "LBA 0" problem on a Seagate drive. This is the second. I will need time to spend on this forum in order to get as much information as possible, and hardware to go deeper.

But have you got your data back?

dd_rescue is on it. For now, there are around 1340 contiguous bad sectors, located after around 3Gb of readable data. I wonder when there will be something readable again...

If there's to many contiguous bad sectors, try to go into a further location and check if the problem remains.

I guess you mean to cancel operation and start it again with an offset/seek parameter or in reverse mode.
dd_rescue spent more than 14 hours on those errors. At this speed, operation will be complete in at least one month !

Probably your drive will die before that if you don't do anything to speed it up.

This is my main worry ! I am going to do something now.
(I forgot to mention that I put a 3,5" fan on it. It is held at 25°C.)

Many thanks for your assistance !

I just wanted to summarize the situation. So, I come back... two months later.

dd_rescue spent three weeks on the drive. I stopped it after ~218Gb (out of 500Gb) because I could not stand it anymore. Luckily, all I needed to restore was in this area. Of course, there were bad sectors but it was a very low ratio. Even when the drive worked at very low speed (like 2 or 4 kb/sec), making noise it does when a bad sector is met, the data was successfully read !

Can we confirm that the nature of the problem is "failing heads" ? I would really like to find a solution to make it faster if such a problem comes again to me. I can not believe that a professional would do it at this speed.

Would any specialized hardware process it (drastically) faster ? Or does the drive speed depend on its state ? I expect to read "no" to the first question, and "yes" to the second.

Many thanks in advance.