Damaged MFT - Is it possible to copy good MFT to bad one?

[TerraNova]

Hi Guys

First attempt:
I have a drive with damaged H2, managed to clone H0,H1 and H3, but data could not be found except raw recovery.
After another head exchange I managed to clone all heads except H2 has a few unreadble sectors. Still no directory structures found, apart from raw recovery. Maybe MFT is damage incl copy. (tried all software rstudio, getdataback etc failed)

Second attempt:
Again i clone the trouble drive to a brand new drive, this time i could see the directory structures but unfortunately H2 playing up again and also H3. Therefore i could not continue any further. Maybe this time i managed to clone the MFT??

My question is : Can I copy the MFT sectors from the Second attempt drive to the first? If yes what range of sectors do i need to overwrite?
I was hoping that after copying the MFT to the 1st attempt drive it will revitalise the directory structures back, possible??


Thanks guys.

[Feklar]

Ptaak:

I would clone the cloned H0,H1 and H3 data from the first clone drive to a third clone drive, and then the H2 data from the second clone drive onto the third clone drive and see what happened.

I previously had thoughts on this: I wondered if you had one bad head and cloned all the good ones, if it might work to use a variable power supply to try to clone the bad head, and try varying the drive's power input voltages, say from 4.8V to 5.2V... that's within tolerance. It might work.

If your clone software can do large numbers of retries, you can sit there with your hand on the supply, watching the outputs of the screen and the meter monitoring the supply, and very slowly adjusting from 4.8 to 5.2 until it reads and moves on. A lot of babysitting, but its possible.

Maybe use a DC-DC converter off the 12 volt rail to supply the 4.8V - 5.2V, so both the 5V and 12V come up together like the drive expects.

[TerraNova]

Hi, I agree with you, the power cycling works well in most cases, I have seen many drives with weak heads and or bad sectors were being revived by this method. Will do more experiment on the converter mentioned.

Cheers

[Arthur]

Ptaak:
I previously had thoughts on this: I wondered if you had one bad head and cloned all the good ones, if it might work to use a variable power supply to try to clone the bad head, and try varying the drive's power input voltages, say from 4.8V to 5.2V... that's within tolerance. It might work.

It doesn't work that way. There is normally of no use varying the voltages. It might potentially harm the disk instead.

[Feklar]

hack-acelabs-and-salvation-and-others-t17164.html#p114917

[fzabkar]

Excuse my ignorance, but why don't successive passes of your cloning tool fill in the missing sectors from the previous passes? Isn't that how multipass software cloning tools such as ddrescue go about it?