Hi guru's!

Strange situation here.

ST9500325AS
Seagate 5400.6 Momentus
Firmware 0003SDM1
Identical donor drive? Yes

Two NTFS partitions...

One completely readable partition with speeds >15 Mb/sec

The other partition however is almost unreadable. Well, I can see all files after CHKDSK recovery;



Which took nearly 8 hours to complete

--
But when I try to move or copy the files it takes a lifetime before a file gets copied. With a bit of luck I can save a couple of Megabytes but it will take months to recover the 60 Gb which is my aim (RAW photos).

Now, what happened?

I use the drive temporarily as external drive and the SATA <-> USB tool died last week on this drive. I started to use another one without problems until suddenly today one of my programs crashed and well... The whole drive just went away.

If you take a good look at the CHKDSK screenshot a lot of things went wrong.

Now I am in the position of an identical drive. Would it help if I swap PCBs?

Or is there a head / platter combination faulty?

i have the same drive and same firmwire where did you get the donor?

you all should do at least like i do lool

my fotos are in 3 hard drives ( all updated) and verbatim dvds ( one backup every year)

Things happen even when you are working on HDDs. Anyway it would be so simple....

I got it with my laptop which was provided with a dual harddisk system. I replaced one with an Intel SSD and one of those two Momentus' I never used after that.

Sadly this laptop is in repair and thats where this whole situation started



I have dvd's and external hard drives too for most of my collection but for a small 'working' part I failed to backup.

If I had I wouldn't be here and this forum probably wouldn't exist anyway.

But I have read a lot of threads now and I have lost most hope.

Still haven't found an explanation though why one partition seems unreadable with an intact file index system while the other partition is capable of running high speed reads. The critical data is on the affected one of course

A very common reason would be internal disk retries due to marginally-readable sectors in the affected partition, causing slow reads.

If I was in your situation, and if I had decided to accept the risks of doing DIY (you need to make that decision for yourself), then I would be using suitable cloning software (which is designed to allow control over retries etc. - search for "cloning" in this forum for examples) to clone that faulty disk onto another disk - instead of spending any time trying to read from the faulty disk by using an OS. As you see, that is taking a long time using normal OS behaviour.