Hello Everyone,

I just received a dead external packard bell drive. This, ofcourse, is just a normal 3.5" SATA drive with a USB-SATA PCB.
So, lifted the drive, plugged it into a ICH SATA port, booted FreeDOS and ran MHDD.

Western Digital WD10EAVS-00D7B1 ; a one TB drive, the Green version.

Results so far:

- Drive appears to start as normal
- No strange noises
- SMART data normal, except over 1400 sectors waiting to be reallocated
- Running a surface scan, been running it for 1 hr, got 193432 on the "! ABRT" counter and nothing on the others – I tried dd before, but it couldn't read anything, not even the MBR

According to the owner it was (yeah, the worst case) "dropped while in use". I'm not a HDD or DR guru, but to me, this looks like broken heads?
This is merely a case of 'trying to get some of the data back'. There is no money involved, nor is the data critical (worth is only emotional - the data, that is).

Now, of course a replacement drive is 'the solution', but I really want to do more on the hardware DR front. I don't have a PC3000 (or whatever the name was), but there are more options, right?
Is there anything I could try?

Were the ABRTs on consecutive sectors?

_________________
Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

The ABRT's are on all sectors at this point... ABRT is at 226597 at this moment, and counting. Other counters are still at 0.
So yes, consecutive sectors

Thanks for replying!

If you skip few hundred thousands at the time, do you still get consecutive ABRTs?

_________________
Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Yeah, even skipping many more causes consecutive ABRTs. I've tried 10000, 100000, 5000000 and 50000000, consecutive ABRTs each time.

Sounds like the drive is not initializing to the point of being able to read data sectors at all. Most probably at least one bad head (and maybe surface damage). Without equipment there is not really anything you can do here.

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

What kind of equipment are we talking about? (I guess it's not screwdrivers...)

Edit: By the way, MHDD reports DRSC and DRDY after I tell it to initialize the disk ("I"), and ends with a "Init drive: Done" message. But that's not what you mean, is it?

Edit2: didn't see any "seek test", (except CX) so tried AAM instead, exits with a "Fail."

I mean PC3000 or similar. And yes, it is possible for the drive to get ready and show correct model name and such without you having access to the data area.

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

Hmm, that sucks for me I guess I shall trash the drive... Thanks both of you anyway!

Edit: would it be worth to someone if I saved the PCB?

It's good for experiments, pity you are too far away

_________________
DataRecovery.bg