Got the HD501LJ out of my Freecom network drive. Probably a stupid idea, but a warranty return won't get the data back, just a new drive.

Had been clicking intermittently for a while, so I ran CHKDSK and thought nothing better of it. IT's about 18 months old.

Now it failed, much more regular clicking, but can read files and copy before it starts to click and stops accessing. I tried using Spinrite, but it rejected the disk with a message I cannot remember.
Checkdisk and defrag just stall or fail.

I think I have identified it as being the heads which are out of calibration but I am not sure.

I read up and it seems possible to buy another drive whch is identical, and replace the heads in a clean environment if you know what youare doing.

I have all my photos, 60gigs, mp3's and files accessed on there and am loathe to lose any of them when it appears it can be resurrected.

I put an ad on my local website, and await response, but unless someone comes up with a clean room, I am in the mind of paying a professional when I have the funds. Which could be a few months yet.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Greg

1st mistake: chkdsk (ruins data)
2nd mistake: spinrite (guy should be shot for making people pay for such rubbish)
3rd mistake: using the drive while it's clicking
4th mistake: defrag (WTF)
5th mistake: guessing at the diagnosis (Priceless)

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

Help graciously appreciated. May I convey my heartfelt thanks for the constructive advice.

BTW I'm English. Have a knock at that too, give your superiority complex a boost.

Would anyone show me a little grace now, please?

Its mainly pointed at anyone else who might try these steps before seeking help.

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

Hi,

My sincere advice is take the help of a Professional DR person/company if the data is of importance.

Replacing the mechanisms inside the HDD is not an easy job, it needs experience and patience.

Cheers,

Your attempts may have done more damage. You haven't mentioned that the drive - 90% sure - experienced shock. These drives are new and even the commercial diag tools don't fully support them yet. There are very few experts in Samsung drives. HSA swap is critical and require equipment and skill. A honest quote would be in range 1000/1500 EUR + VAT depending on drive condition. FYI I have developed proprietary solutions for Samsung DR. PM me if you need to recover your data.

Ingredients :
f/w structure/SA analysis & repairing = 1 hour
Clean room works = 1 hour :
- Platter analysis
- HSA operation (no scratches i hope)
- f/w rechecking, yes, it's Samsung

And now the fun begins :
cloning process (to another 500 GB with damaged sectors maybe - impossible within 1-2 hours )
File system structure analysis (no chk files I hope) = 1 hour
Possibility of logical recovery using software based after analysis file system was damaged, No MFT/ partition table = 1 hour ?
Data verification (no overwritten files/sectors after checkdisk i hope) = 1 hour ?
Payment made, customer have their data back.

Total 8 hrs work......WOW...........

PS : Honestly, I can not do this job within 8 hrs, for me : 24 hrs is still consideration, 48 is still under question, 96 is still a probability, 240 hrs is visible, at least. So, 1500-2000 Euro is worth it.

PPS : this drive became a tough job after drive is "spinned rite"

_________________
My Forum

Agree. 1500+vat=1800

Fair Price.

Thanks Guys!

The drive sat happily doing its job for months and was subject to no shock at all. I can pull a few MB of files off then the head starts to make the clicking sound, so it appears to data is still intact. It reads the file structure and shows all the folders

There's no way I can affort 1500 Euros for this.

I think I can stretch to a new HDD drive to swap the parts and then ask someone who knows how to do it and who has access to a clean room.
I do tech support but not on this, and the videos on youtube make it look much simpler than cloning to another drive.
Spinrite didn't do anything, not even access the process; it analysed and spat a rude message at me.

To quote a previous message:

Ingredients :
f/w structure/SA analysis & repairing = 1 hour
Clean room works = 1 hour :
- Platter analysis
- HSA operation (no scratches i hope)
- f/w rechecking, yes, it's Samsung

This is what I was guessing would be needed and really all I can afford. On my head be it.

Cheers guys, I'm not ignoring your advice, I will take it. It's just the expense!

Greg

Just don't ask us anymore help. You'll be amazed how you'll destroy your drive with apparently doing nothing. P.s. Do you go to restaurants and bring food and want to pay only for dishes and maybe the table?

If ur in UK, I can help.

PM me if interested.

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

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

This is the problem i have been telling you guys, "first post" newbies. Giving them suggestions they BITE you back hahahaha....

Again I emphasized this, those who give out ideas on "how to" DIY data recovery in forum is a completely "IDIOT", I dont care if you say Internet is meant to be for sharing, yeah HELL to you, Knowledge is Power.

PERIOD (c) BlackST 2009 ,credit to cry

How are you going to find someone who has access to a clean room and knows what they are doing without using a professional data recovery service? There is a flaw in your plan.

To be honest I would guess that one of the heads is bad, might be possible to extract a small amount if data without changing heads thus saving some costs.

Sorry, Greg, but BlackST knows what he's talking about. There are very few people in the world qualified to work on your particular drive once it deteriorates even further. It is definitely in the process of failing. You are taking an enormous risk by continuing to use it. Right now, I think it's still salvageable without requiring too much Samsung-specific expertise since it still initializes properly.

I'll tell you what is probably happening to your drive, based on my experience. I don't have a crystal ball, but I would not be surprised that this scenario is accurate.

One of the heads is probably going bad. It's not head 0, so the drive still boots for now. The good heads can still read the MFT from the file system. You know what that means as an IT professional. Attempting to image this drive would probably very quickly grab the first 20 megs or so and then start clicking. If you ran it through MHDD, please don't by the way as it could make things worse and won't do you any good, you'd see recalibration, normal looking disk pattern and then, as it hits the defective head, you'd see a lot of red "X" for "Uncorrectable".

You may be wondering if it's possible to get data only from working heads. It is, with limitations, and not always. You'd have to rely on luck that the entire file can be read with just those working heads as the area not accessible by the dead head is impossible to read with working heads.

Anyone with sufficient tools and skill will charge you a fair fee. This is further complicated by the new technologies Samsung and Seagate introduced recently that physically inhibit us from accessing the platters easily.

Do me a favor, call the people at Acelab and ask them for a quote on PC3000 UDMA + Data Extractor in the UK. A fully equipped DR lab is a collection of hideously expensive equipment.

Here is what will probably happen next if you don't stop the DIY attempts, which are futile anyway:

The drive will stop being recognized in BIOS
The drive will begin to click constantly as SA begins to fail and then the drive won't initialize
Your price to fix it will go even higher as your problem will grow from being solvable with what could be a "routine" head stack replacement to also include SA repair on of the newest drives.

And if you don't believe me, I have a Seagate drive that is doing this exact same thing and I had a customer drive from the same batch that had head #3 failure that also exhibited these symptoms. Replacing its heads solved the problem. The drive I mentioned is a test subject and was part of the mirror onto which we recovered a customer's data. Half of the mirror worked fine, while the test subject drive began to fail. First it clicks occasionally but works, secondly the SA fails, lastly it requires a transplant. I plan to record those stages of failure as they happen when I get some time.

In summary, you are mistaken that this is easy to fix. It may be possible to grab a few megs of data from the beginning of the drive, including the MFT that will generate the file listing, with working heads, but the non-working head will stop the show. You are long past the point of DIY recovery. Save up the money and recover your data when you can afford it. Also, if that data was previously on any other storage medium, it may rarely be possible to recover from there.

A large portion of our work is to provide customers with grief counseling.

Even ACE can do little for these drives, I'm afraid. The unsaid truth: average beggers/users have mostly personal garbage on drives and they are kids with no money or common employees. They are searching for free solutions because for them even the cost of a new hdd is a fortune: avg. income for common jobs here: 1000/1200 eur or less per month - a common HDD 100/120 eur. 10% the wage... Enough said.

Two questions... The first one is an issue that's been bugging me for years. Why is it that idiot users think defragmenting solves problems with a computer? I hear it all the time... "Yeah it was saying something about a delayed write failure so i tried defragmenting it and it didn't help." or "I think there might be something wrong with my hard drive, chkdsk is always running when I start my computer so i tried defragmenting." or "I get messages about crc errors and files that can't be opened so I defragmented and it's still doing that." or other similar stupid things. Seriously, where do people get the idea that defragmenting is a remedial process? It doesn't fix problems, it's not claimed to fix problems (except that stupid Executive Software claims that Diskeeper improves system stability), so where does this idea come from?

Next... If these people (in the previous reply, by BlackST) are so determined to save money, are they seriously expecting to put the questionable drive back into service? I mean repairing it to the point it is stable long enough to get the information off is one thing, but putting a patched up questionable hard disk back into service is just really asking for it. I'd spend the $100 even to prevent another headache of this magnitude. I can walk into Micro Center and buy a Samsung 500GB drive for $54, a Hitachi or Seagate for $69, and various WDs from $55-75. While I'm at it, I might as well buy two and mirror them, cheap as they are.

People trying to be cheap defy rationality.

That's why in the world we have idiots, rich, poor, success people and...gurus.

and I always heard for such stupid suggestion. run defragmenting or simple recreate its partition and something worse is Formating your drive and run logical recovery will save back your life. and one more worst suggest is ask to low level format and repairing the harddrive from bad sector. ALL i can see this because user do not understand what is harddrive itself ans ask opinion from unexperience one that suggest a stupid suggestion. when they run out of idea and try to send and ask help from a pro one. but in fast they have ruin everything. We do not hope such this problem will happen again and keep suggest do not try yourself if know nothing about HD and Data structure.

Some other one ever say that some DR company can save back data from Harddrive that even have been formated 1000 time. mean they can save data even from a overwritien Harddrive..
How come this bullshit become true. and actually User do not understand anymore. HOW data was stored in HD. and How Format do in Harddrive. what was changed In Harddrive when user run formating, save data and other.

So there is lot of misinformation that seem to prove DR is an easy thing.

_________________
Спасибо
СУТИОНО / АПИНГ

I am nearly every day confronted with customers badly needing their computer
respectively laptop repaired, but are not willing to invest a thought or idea how
to treat their tool.

"fix it - thats your job, I pay" - and afterwards - if its a milimeter out of their
routine, they start to complain. I had it once because the icons of a Windows
desktop looked different after reinstalling the system. This guy (doctor) came
10cm to my face and shouted something like "why dont you want to help me..."

For a small DR job: I got about 1500 photos out of a nearly dead 2.5" hdd. I
explained in details to the young customer and suggested to get rid of the
drive - his answer: "Oh, no, I will try to formate it and perhaps I can use it
for other data....." (Either I did not explain good enough or customers usually
dont listen.)

We are confronted with a situation where users were trained for years that they
can build their (cheaper) own pc´s putting spare parts together, that they can
"repair" it in just changing some cheap parts, and that they can buy really high
end stuff for a few cents. In consequence the DR job must be much easier as
these "gurus" advise and they only fool the public respectively their customers.

And as everywhere exist, there exist black sheeps charging about € 2.000,- for
reactivating a partition on a healthy drive.

This forum exists since years and since I started to join I´ve seen hundreds of
one time members - no City/Country of origin, like calling a doctor from Europe
to Egypt - hello guru doctor, I am sick, can you pleeeese tell me - for free -
how can I treat myself.... (no further details from newbie)

What follows is a big discussion between answering (old) forum members where
the requesting newbie somewhere allready disapeared.

Perhaps it would be an idea, that a new member - when he/she signs in will see
an information like:

Dear new member - if you want to receive help out of this forum - you should
prepare all necessary details in your question, otherwise you may not expect
a complete or correct answer.
Your correct City and Country would perhaps help you to find a specialist for
your problem in your area....

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