Dear Sirs and Mams,

I have been given the task to rescue all the data off of a WD600 (WD600AB-00BVA0) hard drive, but so far I have failed at

everything I have tried. Is it possible that someone here can give me some insight as to what to do from here? Here is what I

have on the drive...

DRIVE BRAND/MOD: WD600 WD600AB-00BVA0

GEOGRAPHY: 2 partitions (ie: [D] [E]) slave.

FILE SYSTEM: FAT32

CAUSE OF CRASH: Unknown, but the drive just froze after clicking on a folder with lots of other folders within it, Then the

system was restarted, and it would never boot back into Win98.

SOUNDS: No sounds, no clicking.

STEPS TAKEN:

a. I had an exact match parts drive of this model (WD600AB-00BVA0).

b.Tried swapping out an identical PCB board from an identical WD600 HDD, but it still will not boot into Win200, WinXP, or

Ubuntu. I believe that the bad drive's PCB board is good because the parts drive boots to any OS with it attached.


c. Tried running tests in MHDD, but the drive would not load in MHDD.

d. Tried loading Hard Disk Sentinel, and it showed the drive as being 99% healthy.

e. I then tried cloning the drive in Media Tools Professional to the doner drive (WD600 WD600AB-00BVA0), but it had so many

errors in the 1st sectors, that it was impossible to do a clone from beginning to end. I then tried a reverse clone, and It

got all the way to 99% complete when it encountered the errors again at the beginning sectors, and started making a lot of

noises. the drive just stayed at 99% complete, so I stopped the cloning there, thinking that I had most of the data.

f. I tried mounting the freshly cloned drive into Winxp, and although the drive letters mounted, the data was not accessable.

g. I tried mounting the drive into Ubuntu, and both origional partitions were there, but only some of the data was visible in

partition#1 and partition#2 was not accessable at all!


h. I tried loading the failing drive once more in Ubuntu, but the drive is no longer showing up in the BIOS, and it is

clicking loudly, like a typical WD HDD.


HERE IS WHAT I NEED TO KNOW:


1. Is there recovery software, or a testing tool that would allow me to access the data on the drive that I cloned to?


2. (Defective Heads or Pre-Amp) Would swapping the head stack from a doner drive allow access to the date?


3. Does this sound like a system area issue?


Please get back to me on this.

Thank you very much,

balchund

you should be able to see the "cloned drive" that you copied 99% of the data to with software such as R-studio or Getdataback (Fat version in your case) even if you did not get the first 1% of the drive this is still very successful and likely no relevent data will be missing.

try downloading the r-studio or getdataback demo and see if it can see the data on the drive you cloned to

do not mess around with the damaged drive anymore; only the drive that you copied to.

imaging software would not help. This is translator problem on module 25h

How did you come to this translator diagnosis? It's the typical head crash toward the front of the drive. The heads only failed and started to click upon the damaged first 1% of the drive.

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Not sure I understand. Can you explain what "module 25h" problem is?

Thank you very much,

balchund

What?

Sounds like a bunch of bads right at the beginning of the drive. Not unusual at all. Like Russwinters said, should be no problem getting data back with some software.

Since the user has imaged the vast majority of the disk, he might as well let an imaging software crunch through the part at the beginning. Who knows, maybe he will get some file table out of it.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Correct, if it was a bad translator then the data would not be accessable at all beyond a certain point (sometimes not at all).

Sounds very much like damage to the first part of the drive, and GDB / RS should come up trumps.

Also agree that it won't do any harm to let Media Tools munch it's way through the first 1%, as the patient drive is buggered anyway.

Sean

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

For me it's more likely a crash at the beginning than translator, but with a screwdriver only and without several thousand $ is impossible to diagnose it precisely. At this point, just because the data is not important (otherwise the owner should have given to a pro) some experiments can maybe lead to something else than nowhere.
BUT : if there is a bad surface damage, trying to read the data there continuously by software could lead to definitive head crash (and then please don't ask us anymore) or error list overflow or some other collateral damage. Your data, your choice. No money, no data. That's life.

Yes, most likely a head crash occured at the front of the drive; and I agree once you confirm that the other 99% of the data has been recovered successfully go ahead and try to image through that 1% (assuming you didn't get the data you wanted from the other 99%, which it is more likely you did)

Enjoy your shiney new paperweight!