... with bad scratches on top surface.

What is your experience with these Toshiba drives? Since there's no known way (AFAIK, at least) to edit head map on these drives, I'm not sure if going for a couple donors or not. On top of that (the headcrash on top surface), I'm not very confident about chopping off the top head. My experience points towards these drives needing all physical heads even to try to start the firmware.

What do you think, going for those donors, giving it up...? Maybe any tricks regarding the bad haed/surface?

Thanks in advance.

These drives won't start if some heads are missing, not to mention that the top surface is actually H0 on those.

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Most attempts in scenarios like such as yours wind up with partial recovery at best (often not even the critical data as file tree access is not possible) with lots of waste of time and resources.
Not worth the headache.

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

Doomer, labtech, thanks for answering. I'm afraid then I'll get rid of it.

Cheers

During the last two weeks we extract data from the similar Toshiba with a concentric scratch as well, all that time it reads steadily, but slowly -- approx. 2.5 GB/day. And that's 24/7 extraction.
I.e. the total time required could easily be up to a year, so consider what price would be reasonable for such job.

Also, according to our experience, directory structure could be lost and if the target data is database(-s) of some kind, then probably it's better to not start at all. For video chances aren't high as well.
But if the client needs photos, MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, .PSD files, etc., then it's worth trying.

As for the head 0, if I recall correctly, it could vary for different models. I don't remember for this particular model, but suggest to rely on Doomer's info.
Generally the best way is just to check which head is which, although it's not critically important. Data can be extracted from Toshibas in similar condition, but as you see, it's a real PITA :)

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.