Toshiba 80 GB drive reading half the sectors

[TXRanger]

I have a Toshiba MK8026GAX drive that we got in for data recovery. The drive is detected properly and the DeepSpar read about half the sectors. There was a pattern to the good and bad sectors which seemed to mostly chunks of about 28,000 read sectors, then 28,000 unread sectors. I thought it would be a bad head, so a donor was ordered, and tested after it came in to be sure it is working properly. The drive is a 2-platter, 4-head drive ... so now I realize that 2 heads would be bad to only read half the drive. The head swap went well, but the drive is still failing on the same sectors as the original heads, and it can still read the sectors it could read before the head swap. I put the patient heads in the donor drive, and I let it run MHDD for a while and it didn't have any read errors when I stopped it at 20% of the drive.

One other note: On many of the unreadable sections of the drive, it makes a "click-grind-click" noise when trying to image the drive. I left the platters in the drive, but I couldn't see any obvious platter damage on the exposed top platter surface, or from what I could see of the other platter surfaces.

Any other ideas?

[harddrivespecialist]

You can send it to a pro or throw it away.

[poehere]

Heads. If you are a DR company you can change them out other than this do as harddrivespeicalist said send it to another DR company who can. Sorry

[TXRanger]

Maybe I wasn't clear in the original post, but I did swap out the heads. After the head swap, the drive was able to read the same sectors as it could before the head swap and still unable to read the same sectors it couldn't read before with the original heads. I put the patient heads in the donor drive and it reads the donor drive with the patient heads. So this confirms to me that the issue is not the heads.

[hddlab]

Did you try to check translator?