Hitachi 7K200-120 images well in bursts

[mediaman]

OK, so this ones got me on the learning curve.

The disk spins up and images fine about 50% of the surface. It's 120Gb. But starting about LBA 29M and then at 39, 79M and 139M It starts these bursts: good, (3 seconds or so) bad (as long as it takes). At LBA 139M these slow read bursts are converted to flat out read errors and things grind to a halt. An audio clip would have been great, you can hear the heads start normally, intensify, then seem to reset and cycle again (see the time scale on the current monitor, which exactly reflects the sound).

I have tried forwards, backwards etc.

Thankfully I have already recovered the users data, about 66Gb, (I'm still not sure how the image was actually useful but it was!!).

I would imagine weak/failing heads. Would a HS help?

Thanks

[CK]

Weak head I guess, well worth trying a HS

[drc]

I've had two of these drives come across my desk this past week that both had one completely failed head.

[beto]

Did u tried to got sector using head map?

Regards

[mediaman]

Hi beto, no, i didn't try that yet, but i used a "media map" that the latest Insight has. Its a different thing I know, (for example it only images the occupied sectors).

How do you use a head map? Is it a PC3000 feature? It is not on Atola AFAIK.

[beto]

Yes its a feature of DE, using a head map u could select wich heads works

regards

[mediaman]

Thanks Beto. No that feature is not on Atola yet, and we don't have DE. I do believe that the final production release of Atola Insight will have that feature.