Hi Guys,

My hard drive seems to be failing on me. It went completely silent a day ago. The platters still spin up, but I am getting little to no sound from the drive. Plus, the data transfer rates have hit rock bottom. I have to wait ages to open a folder and I am getting only 100 kb/s in transferring or copying files. S.M.A.R.T status is giving me 0% fitness but 90% performance, which makes me think the PCB might be bad or the header is faulty.

I want to get this drive repaired WITHOUT losing the data, even if it is temporary, because I just want to be able to recover the data on it, which has taken me ages to accumulate and is extremely important. I live in Islamabad by the way, so a service that is within my reach would be more convenient.

The drive is a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green with Model No. WD10EADS - 00M2B0.

Please take a look at the pics and contact me even if you know anyone who can fix it. Any help you can offer will be appreciated.

More like it has bad/weak sectors and is dying.

Get the drive cloned with a NON-WINDOWS tool such as Media Tools Pro or dd_rescue before it fails completely, or better still take it to someone who has pro tools like Deepspar Disk Imager.

Then extract the data from the image.

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http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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That is one of the possible solutions; however, with the horrendous data transfer speeds I'm getting, I have over 900 GB of data on the drive and I am getting copying speeds of 100 Kb/s. If you do the math, this will take a month or even more! With a failing drive, I don't actually have that much time.

Doesn't seem like it has bad sectors because I copied over a few small files from all over the drive and they are perfectly fine and not corrupted at all. A short bad sectors test didn't pick up anything either (took a whole day because of the bad speeds though).

I don't hear any clicking sounds characteristic of a bad header. Maybe the header placement is messed up? If the problem is in the PCB, would the drive still be detectable?

Is there no way to diagnose the actual problem and get the drive repaired?

@xstrike9999,

I think pcimage might have meant to say "bad/weak heads" (I hope he'll correct me if my guess is wrong ). These often cause slow reads, due to all the underlying error recovery & retries which are then being done.


Perhaps you means heads, and not "header"? The word "header" doesn't make sense in this context. As I said, weak heads can explain the slow reads.


If you want correct diagnosis then yes, there is a way - send the drive to a suitable DR company, who have the necessary equipment, skills & experience.

Sorry about using header, I always get the two mixed up. So, I guess there is no other way than to send this to a recovery company. This is gonna end up costing me a fortune!

No other way than sending this to a recovery company. I just need a temporary fix to copy some data on the drive...

What you call "TEMPORARY FIX" is exactly what a data recovery company does to get your data out. Unfortunately, this is gonna cost money

Could of course be bad heads

But cannot rule out media issues (bad/weak sectors) as I'm assuming he is trying to image under Windows

Also there could be a "slow response" firmware issue, I have seen many times on newer WD's

Either way, it's a pro job and needs PROPER DIAGNOSIS WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

@pcimage: Thanks for the clarification

@xstrike9999:

I gave a comment on your question about diagnosis. Then you came back and repeated again your first question, about how to copy some data which is on the drive - you already got an answer from pcimage for that, as your first reply.

IMHO here is a summary of your 4 main choices (with some variations also possible):

* DIY recovery attempt (no diagnosis) - if the data is not valuable, and you accept that your recovery attempts might kill the disk and/or you might make any later professional recovery much more expensive (or perhaps impossible).

* Professional recovery (which will also give some diagnosis of the problem) - if the data is valuable.

* Do nothing for a while - while you save the money for professional recovery, or need time to think about your options.

* Scrap the drive.

Choose one

First of all, thanks for putting up with my n00bishness guys. Second, what are my options for DIY recovery?

See the first reply from pcimage above, for a DIY suggestion:


If you search the forum regarding cloning, you'll find previous discussions on this topic and various other programs which you can consider, depending on your skill, experience, preferred OS, amount you are willing to pay etc. Obviously cloning the drive will (ignoring compression options) require you to have another drive of the same size, or equivalent filesystem space, to hold the cloned image of this failing drive.