Hey, quick update just to say that I'm at the scraping phase, 14k non-scraped sectors remaining, 14k bad ones. That's between 7 and 14 megabytes of unrecoverable data which is really good for 150GB.
I ended up doing this on my laptop which has been running non-stop for some days, and I didn't limit the area read. There were things to read at the end.
It would appear the heads might be weak, but not damaged enough to harm the data. I suppose I got lucky because all my copying and cloning could've very well done big damage. The disk has shut down several times during the cloning. When that happens I just reconnect it and tell hddsuperclone to resume.
Anyway, I'm happy to say I now have a much better understanding of how hddsuperclone and disks/disk recovery work.
Couple of quick questions:
1. After scraping I'll attempt a retry on all the bad sectors. Is there anything I can do to maximize success rate? I'll monitor how many bad sectors are recovered that way, if any. Will there be any use attempting a retry twice?
2. If say a RAW image has a couple bad sectors inside it, and what we recover has a couple zeroes in the middle, what kind of effect can we expect on the image? Will it be readable at all? Will it simply be a couple black/wrong color pixels? Will it have more visible effects such as parts of the image repeating, or glitchy looking images?
3. From the info I gave, can we guess what happened to the disks/heads during the fall? I'm just curious!
Thanks again for your help, hddsuperclone is great
Edit: last question!
You know how windows can mark sectors as bad and replace them with new "replacement" sectors, with 'chkdsk /r' ?
How does that interact with a cloning? Does the cloning copy the "bad sector pointers"? (not sure how that works in the first place)
Or does the cloning skip the sectors marked as bad by chkdsk? Or are the "bad sector pointers" on another part of the disks or part of the controller, which isn't accessed by the cloning - so nothing will be skipped and no pointers will be copied?