Got a Samsung HD160JJ with multiple issues today. To begin with the PCB was damaged. Once I got one working the drive would click 1 time then 4 times when powered, 6 times when IDing, and would image fine in some spots but only click in others. At first I thought fine, bad head, whatever, but the pattern of functional areas vs clicking areas in the data area is very strange.

Starting at the beginning of the drive I found about 4GB good followed by 4GB bad, 4GB good, 4GB bad, 8GB good, 4GB bad, 12GB good, 4GB bad, 16GB good, 4GB bad, 12GB good, 4GB bad, 16GB good, 4GB bad, 12GB good, 2GB bad, etc etc. The good areas were always larger than the bad areas in what seems to be even multiples. Unfortunately I don't have any SA tools for Samsung drives unless there's a version of vtools floating around out there that works on P80SD series.

Any thoughts?

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

Never mind, was looking in the wrong folder. I wish this forum didn't have a timeout for post editing.

The above is no longer true but I am still somewhat stumped as to what to do about it.

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

This one continues to puzzle me because it sure acts like a bad head except that I would expect the unreadable portions of the disk to be more regular.

Here's terminal log:



When I plug in a SATA cable and attempt to view the partitions in, say XP, I get the following output:



After the "Idl" there is clicking, then "Wk", then more clicking, then "?", then clicking continues indefinitely.

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

3 out of 4 heads are ok? thats my guess. clone using good heads, good chance of getting a lot of good data.

That was my thought too, just weird that the good parts and bad parts were so irregular. In other drives the heads seem to switch after much smaller increments of LBA, and in this one the good vs bad was 4/4 4/4 8/4 12/4 16/4 12/4 16/4 12/2 12/4 12/3 24/5 3/1 8/4 12/4 ...

Though now that I'm looking at it the number of bad regions is equal to the number of zones, so I guess it really does just have a strange layout.

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

Use Hutil / Short Test or SelfTest. They both check first heads.

Are Geo / A / S / smart / AZ ok?