IMHO yes

Thank you very much for your offer.
I will discuss that with the owner of the HDD.
If he is willing to pay, I will accept your offer in any case.
How much do you want for your service? You can send me a private message.

I would also like to see the difference between your hardware imaging and my software-only-solution
But for fairness you should make 2 images, 1 before firmware issue fixing (if there's something wrong) and 1 after

most likely not a FW issue

ISTM that the OP only needs the area from 30GB to 35GB. That should fit on 1 or 2 DVDs, or a small flash drive.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

It's no problem, there's no need of DVD's.

I can also send to USB flash drives with a size of 64GB.
So the full image can be compared.

But before sending the HDD maybe I'm going to take another image (or at least near the bad area),
in order to achieve the best result.

Because the reading was so strange I initiated very big "Jumps" over the bad area.
At the end the "Jumps" were 1GB big to skip the bad area to prevent head wear.
But of course the "last Jump" may have led to a missing area behind the bad area.
I don't know how big this area is, maybe 10-100MB.
I will try to find out and possibly "correct" this missing zone in my image.

This post should not be interpreted as a justification in advance
I just want a "fair" comparison between hard- and software-imaging.

I hope I can send it today, because I go to the city today.
Please excuse the delay

I had some "problems" to fix and did not found the time last week.
The cloned destination drive had some errors on it.
This came to light when I cloned it to the USB flash drive.
It was only a few, but I did not want to "miss" this sectors.

Luckily I always make 1 "Image" and 1 clone, so I did not have to touch the original drive.
So I made a "freshly cloned hard drive" which I will send to you instead of the USB flash drive.

Thank you very much for your help again.

@Spildit:
The package was sent
I hope it will find it's way to you.

I have send you 4 drives:
The original drive, 1 cloned and 2 "spare drives" if you need firmware modules from them.
But please be aware with one of the spare drives, you will see that the PCB is somehow "repaired" in an unusual way.

I had decided not to make any other imaging-attempts with the original-drive.
I didn't want to risk head-wear before you have tried to image with your HRT.
So I still miss the mentioned area (30-35GB), but the zone behind went very well (35-38GB).

I still hope that the bad zone is unreadable because of firmware issues,
although I understand that the chance is very low.

I am also very very curious
I hope that the software will not perform too bad.
It will also be very interesting to see the time difference of the 2 solutions.
But I have to admit, that I cannot surely remember how many time it took.
Effectively it was probably only a few hours because of the "small" source (only 40GB).

I would prefer the cloned drive (seagate) instead of one of the spares.
Please clone to this drive.
I have no "trust" to the spare drives. I think they are not 100% OK.


I think it's worth if we get some extra data.

Thank you very much, I wish you also a nice weekend and a good time.

Maybe I'll be offline till 02.05.2016 because I want to celebrate Passover.

The power of hardware imaging and know-how are undisputed.

_________________
Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Very thorough work, well done

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Imaging results would be pretty much the same across all, give or take few LBAs. It is not so much about the tool per se, but the condition of the block. Special parameter reading does not always give better results.

P.S. Don't know anything about MRT, but given past discussions, I guess it is self explanatory.

_________________
Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

@Spildit

Awesome work
I have to thank you very very much for your help.

I'm very happy that you could get the important "extra" data.
Thank God the sectors were not physically damaged as expected.

Thank you very very much!
Hope the package makes it way back to me without issues.

What's your conclusion about comparing my software-only-clone with your hardware-supported-clone?

Hello Alex,

Sorry for the delay.
I have received your package.
And it looks like the data is ALL there
Thank you very much again.

But please give me some more time to check the files, before you delete your ímage file.

I will also do the comparison with my cloning tool.
I hope I'll get the time for doing this in the next days.
Then I'll come back to show the results.

Best Regards

Looks like my cloning software has turned out to be more than only HiFi.
Now it seems to be really SciFi
With it's Science Fiction Technology it could read the "repaired" original HDD without any errors!
I guess this comes from the supernatural algorithms which probably could emulate a contactless turbocharged laser magnetic reading unit.

Joking aside guys

Can someone please explain this unexpected result?

@Spildit
Is it possible that you accidentally "translated" those bad sectors to good ones?

Here's a screenshot of Victoria 4.47


It looks the same as your pic at first sight.

There are also 182 reallocated sectors and 189 pending sectors.

I cannot imagine that. My cloning tool has no implementation for such things..... at least as far as I know and understand the source-code.


This is the scan result with API mode

Interestingly it differs from the scan in PIO mode


How could this be done without vendor specific commands? I don't think my cloning tool has built in VSCs.
I thought reading defective sectors with bad checksums could only be read by VSCs, or am I wrong?


Smart Data (see screenshot in last post) seems to be similar to your screenshot.


As far as I can see ALL the data from the important partition is there.
But I cannot confirm that until the owner tells me the same.
He hasn't picked up his drive till now

I think this should happen in the next days.
Please keep the image file till I get the OK from the owner.