Hi,

I would like to open a thread about what do the bad sector maps can reveal about the drive problem.

Which kind of regular patterns are there and how to interpret them ?

The map below, with a beautiful regular pattern, shows the result of imaging a WD My Passport 1.5 TB drive.

Please post your artworks !



N.B. For the picture above, the splitting of bad blocks was not finished, but had lasted about one day without significant progress ; the last successful read was for about one day too. I assume the squares are purple and not scarlet (the color for bad sectors) because non-splitted (blue) blocks may still be present inside these areas.

The picture above tells me that the drive probably has one head that isn't reading...something that would only have taken a minute or two to figure out with DeepSpar or PC3000.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

It looks like 1 head out of 6 is bad. I suspect that a HD Tune read benchmark, shortstroked to 2GB, would have been able to pinpoint the actual faulty head. That would require less than a minute.

There are some examples in the following thread.

How to determine number of heads using HD Tune:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... 650&p=1796

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A backup a day keeps DR away.