WD Scorpio Blue not reading sectors

[rogfanther]

But does windows load when the bad wd isn´t connected ?

[Falconetti_PL]

Sure, it works ok without the bad disk

[rogfanther]

Get Victoria and WDMarvel demo installed on the computer.

Both can be made to re-scan for hard disks after they are loaded, so wait then for someone to instruct you about that.

[maximus]

Code:

it is valuable but not worth $800, and I got such price quote from professional recovery service.

Was the drive sent to this company for inspection and quote, or is this just a general quote price?

This question seems to be unanswered...

[Falconetti_PL]

I described them symptoms, and they gave me the price quote, no inspection.

[rogfanther]

Create a bootable disk of MHDD from

http://files.hddguru.com/download/Software/ file mhdd32ver4.6iso.zip then see if it detects your disk.

[maximus]

- electronics responds, at least disk geometry returns correct values
- Windows sees it as uninitialized

The WD is however detected on other machine with Windows 7 but on USB interface, and tools don't see it.

So did windows report the proper drive size in disk management? Your original post indicated that the drive had the proper geometry, which I took to mean that it showed the proper drive size.

[maximus]

I would vote for head damage or modules damage but if the drive picks up ok with correct geometry then i would vote for translator not loading because of damaged head.

There is one other possibility, IF the drive does identify correctly at least once when powered on. When the drive reads a bad spot, it could go into a device fault condition. This can happen when the OS tries to read data such as the MBR and partition data (you would be surprised the crazy sectors the OS can want to read when it detects a drive). Once in device fault, all reads will fail instantly, as likely will all commands, even the identify device command. The drive will not respond properly again until it is power cycled. This makes it possible for a drive to show up in the OS with the correct size, but then appear to be dead because it went into fault.

This condition can potentially be overcome when using a hardware imager that can perform resets based on a timeout. The resets can prevent going into fault. So if this ends up being the condition, it may still be possible to read data from the drive. I can do it with software

[maximus]

To get a little bit off topic on the WD background scanning, I seem to remember someone that had a bad case of the slow issue, but after patching got a 100% recovery. I don't think there were any reallocated sectors either. So without finding any bad sectors in the user area, that would lead one to believe that the scanning was finding something it did not like in SA or some other part of the disk, maybe the area reserved for reallocated sectors, or who knows maybe even sectors that are in the P list to begin with. At least it is easy to turn off (as long as SA is not locked). I have always wondered what the dangers of patching are when there is a bad head leaving the possibility of a bad SA write. I did have one person report to me that their disk died right after patching, although there is no way to tell if the patch caused it or it was just time for the disk to die.

[maximus]

One more thing a bit off topic: I will be adding a drive lock check to the next version of HDDSuperClone, so that there will be no question if the drive is locked or not when using the program.

Now I want to state that I still stand behind my claim to be able to diagnose the drive from a short run of HDDSuperClone. And depending on how and if the drive is detected in Linux, that would be part of the diagnosis. That could all be done using the live CD, and without any vendor specific commands (no need to read modules for basic diagnosis).

And I would also like to point out that from what I remember it is possible to run both Victoria and WDR Demo from Hiren’s Boot CD version 15.0 (but not version 15.2, doesn’t work properly). You simply boot from the CD and use a flash drive to access those programs. I think the programs needed to be copied to a specific folder or something, and maybe a driver copied someplace, but all basically the same things that need to be done to install them anyway. I am going off memory and don't remember the specifics, but I know I was able to do it.