Hi,

I am trying to recover data forma Maxtor 6Y080L0 , F/W YAR41BW0 that after swtiching power off became very very slow and seemed to have developed read errors (COPYR very very slow and connecting the drive to another PC practically blocked the OS because of the slowliness and infinite retries). Strange : the drive has two NTFS partitions , but the problem affects only the first partition, the other has no read errors and COPYR works fine setting the range for sectors starting from the beginning of the second partition.
Physical or logical problem ? Hard to decide. The drive calibrates and is correctly recognised by the BIOS, only the number of relocated sectors in SMART thresholds is exceeded.
I was able to read (content not checked yet!) about 9.000.000 blocks out of 160.000.000 in more than 2 days (anyway only 122.000.000 are needed because the rest is the other partition), the temptative could be extremely time-consuming and probably not worth (don't know if it could lead to a successful restoration of the data).
I think the user made a BIG mistake connecting the HD as slave to another XP O.S. machine, so the partition tables may be more confused.... but I don't know.
Before attempting to work with the firmware zone (a possible catastrophic failure may occur at anytime and then the data is gone for sure!) , someone has got any idea or similar experience?
By the way, the firmware zone seems to be intact but I don't know if there's a problem i.e. modules with correct content and wrong checksum.
Thanks and best regards.

Hello,

the drive probably got damaged by faulty writing due to overheating or other problems in writing. There is no easy way to get the data off. If U need only the second partition, U can clone that, that's the easiest thing.
As for the first one I would keep on cloning, then use some logical recovery SW.
don't forget to cool the drive with a fan at least!
regards,
pepe

Thanks, Pepe.

Probably you're right about overheating : all these drives develop a lot of heat because of high rotational speed, electronics and probably design ; the PC chassis should act as a heatsink, but I see everyday HDDs mounted with just 2 screws out of 4 or not well-tightened, or simply not considering adequate venting.
I think that you can't use cheap drives in mission critical systems that run 24/7 just thinking about the price when building up a PC or workstation....
Anyway , investigating some more, I discovered that G-LIST was getting bigger and bigger (obviously, growing defects...) , clearing it didn't change anything
By the way, tried resetting SMART attributes/thresholds/logs and reset the security (password) , but didn't change anything (it was a last resort because problems on these items I know that could lead to extreme slowliness of HDDs...)
Running MHDD SMART short test reported that the test halted at 60% (code 130) with the read element failed (obviously), MHDD scan show a lot of X, A and delays...
How strange ! Almost all the failing drives I have seen had problems on the system area and data area almost intact, this one is the exact opposite !!!
Anyway, keeping cloning is OK but at a rate of 2,000,000 blocks in 2 days , considering the partition has 122,000,000 blocks to be cloned it will take months to get the job done (too much ?!) and I think the drive will break in a few days.
This is one of the situations where data recovery is not worth, maybe. It will take less time typing back the data stored on the drive.
But everything is experience and is worth the time spent testing and trying....
Has anybody experienced something similar and want to share his opinion?

Regards.