Hello all,

One of my hdds - a Samsung HD103SJ (1TB) has recently failed with a series of many unreadable error "stripes" across the disk. The stripes are about 14GB wide near the disk beginning, and decrease to about 9GB wide near the disk end. The drive doesn't seem to be making any unusual noises.

Samsung's ESTool reports many pages of LBA errors (no surprise), plus "AJ38 : SMART Error".

Imaging was attempted using ddrescue. The error regions had to be manually avoided, but that leaves me with no NTFS MFTs on the biggest partition (873 GB), and about 1/4 to 1/3 of the data missing.

Does anyone know what type of drive failure could cause this pattern?

Daz

bad head

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Totally agree.

confirmed.

Thank you all for the concise diagnosis. It's more than I got from either Samsung, or the local DR companies!
Now maybe they can give me a more accurate quote for the work..

Regards, Daz

If you took this already to a DR company for a quote on it and they could not tell you what was wrong in this drive such as heads I would not go back to them to have them quote me again and fix this drive for me. They should of known what was wrong with your drive when they examined it from the beginning and been able to quote you on the repair of this drive. Good idea to find a better DR company to take this drive to if your data is important to you on this one.

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Iorana Haraharaini