Hi I am having some trouble imaging this drive;

Western Digital Scorpio
WD3200BEVT
320GB

The imaging process starts off ok but then stops and the drive seems unreadable. If i skip 200k sectors and start again it works for a while, then stops reading.

Basically it seems to fail in a pattern.
0 - 550000 readable
550001 - 750000 unreadable
750001 - 1303000 readable
1303001 - 1503000 unreadable
1503001 - 2063000 readable

Approx 550k is readable at a time followed by approx 200k unreadable.

Any ideas what could be causing it, or suggestions on how to image the drive? I suspect a head failure or maybe a scratch but would either of those produce what seems like a pretty regular pattern...

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Seems like a head issue. What image tool do you use?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Hi thanks for the reply. I suspect that it is the head too, is there a way I can confirm it?

I have been trying it with dd in Linux.

hi
you'll need an imager able to make a headmap and check if 1 head is related to all those LBAs.
Bye
Luca

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Data Recovery pro in Italy
www.ultrarecovery.com

Thanks I will look for something that can do that, any recommendations? preferably free

The type of hardware imagers irs is referring to are Deepspar DDI & Atola but your looking at about £2,500 - £3,000 min.
Sorry to tell you but you are not going to get a free fix.
If head 1 turns out to be faulty then your out of luck with DIY.
Will send you a PM if you want me to take a look? I'm near Derby & am not to far from Birmingham

Loki

Hi Loki, thanks for the offer.

The data, although sentimental, isn't really worth sending for pro recovery. I am a bit of a tinkerer so if there is anything I can at minimal expense I will give it a try.

Out of curiosity, is it possible to connect the terminal pins with a rs232/ttl adaptor and test the heads that way? Is that what Deepspar /Atola do?

in these drives you don't have a diagnostic consolle via com port as for seagate drives.
so you can't use DIY solution through TTL.
Deepspar and Atola (pc3000 DE and SD datacompass also )make a map of the LBA for each head and that way you can skip the surface for the broken head.
Bye
Luca

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Data Recovery pro in Italy
www.ultrarecovery.com