Hello Everyone,

I'm one of those "lucky" people who bought a Seagate ST31000333AS (4 of them to be exact!) without reading up how bad these drives are .
I've been using them since February in an Linux LVM Volume Group.

A few days ago, one of the drives failed and has been giving problems reading some areas of the disk.
I managed to use dd_rescue to copy most of the disk to a new disk, but there is around 10GB which is unreadable, and causes the drive to hang (I'm not sure if this is the correct word, it stops responding to all commands). After a reboot, I am able to access the disk again (except that 10GB), and using smartctl I discovered that Reallocated_Sector_Ct has failed.

So my question is if there is any way to get that 10GB worth of data?

Would a PC3000 help me in this case?

I also tried MHDD, but it also causes the same issue when performing a surface scan.

PC3000 will help you. Why don't you download one now or order one direct from manufacturer?

download ?!?

Hmm well I decided this is out of my league and decided I'll get the data professionally recovered.

Maybe I'll get a PC3000 anyway, I want to learn how to do this stuff myself anyway .

I don't suppose there is any Linux based software that one could use with the PC3000 is there? would be a major pain installing windows.

PC3000 is a combo HW+SW system. It's gonna cost you about 10'000 (ten thousand) EURO (UDMA version AND support fee etc.) . Are you really sure you want to learn and do it by yourself now?