Advice on recovery for a WD My Passport 2TB USB drive

[koitsu]

Ok here are some points that you can consider :
{...snipping for brevity...}

I read everything you wrote in full and actually understand it completely. I say this a lot, but THANK YOU. This makes perfect sense.

I had no idea about the WDR tool. I can certainly build a small system running XP using a reliable Intel ICH9 chip for southbridge/SATA -- that's a walk in the park. I have lots of spare parts/servers/PCs here. (I ran XP on my desktop until just last year, switching to 7). I'll give WDR a try when I get there. Thanks!

[koitsu]

Just a general FYI: the next 6-7 days are gonna be busy for me due to my job, errands, life responsibilities, plus health issues.

So if I don't respond in the thread (or PMs) promptly, don't worry -- I haven't disappeared.

I hope everyone is having a good holiday season and has a great New Year.

P.S. -- For Spildit: I purchased a lifetime licence for WDMarvel, by the way, so that tool is now something I have in my arsenal. Seems it would work best on a dedicated XP system -- I tried it on my 7 workstation and Windows became quite irate about the unsigned drivers it was trying to install (which failed). XP's a lot more lenient and I really can't risk screwing up my main workstation (I do a LOT of things on it unrelated to data recovery, so you can understand).

[koitsu]

Quick update which I think will surprise/amaze most:

I've found a way to keep the drive from going into a catatonic state. I've had it up/working with I/O now for almost 5 minutes and it's still quite happy.

I'm working on figuring out exactly what causes the drive to go catatonic, but given what my workaround does, I would say a specific region/area of the drive (LBA/sector-wise) is causing the drive to lock up (despite SMART not showing anything). Meaning there is something physical on the platter (gut feeling) that causes the drive to lock up hard. I'm thinking the drive firmware is trying to access something within that physical area shortly after the drive starts up and thus locks up.

All said, I believe it may be possible for me to use ddrescue in combination with this workaround to get back a large sum of data off this drive.

I'm very very excited to say the least. I'll post progress as I have it.

[koitsu]

Well, I have a way to keep the drive "alive" for longer periods of time, but it does appear that reading certain LBA ranges cause the drive to go into a catatonic state. From my review of my data, I'm thinking these regions are calculable.

I believe this supports fzabkar's theory that there may be a specific head that's misbehaving or wonky. The drive has 4 platters with 8 logical/physical heads.

The bright side is that with my workaround, the successful I/O period is substantially longer, allowing me to try the mod02/mod32 patch without too much worry. I'll give that a shot. I'm hoping that might make the overall drive behaviour on failures/retries/etc. "better" for something like ddrescue.

[koitsu]

Oh my... it's working after the mod02/mod32 patch! The drive didn't go into a catatonic state, and I/O appears stable so far:

Code:

GNU ddrescue 1.17
About to copy 2000 GBytes from /dev/sdb to /dev/sdc
    Starting positions: infile = 0 B,  outfile = 0 B
    Copy block size: 128 sectors       Initial skip size: 128 sectors
Sector size: 512 Bytes

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued:    16818 MB,  errsize:       0 B,  current rate:     119 MB/s
   ipos:    16818 MB,   errors:       0,    average rate:   98929 kB/s
   opos:    16818 MB,    time since last successful read:       0 s
Copying non-tried blocks...


/dev/sdb = origin drive (now patched)

/dev/sdc = destination drive (same capacity, slightly more LBAs, same sector size)

I'll let this run and see what the result is in the morning.

[maximus]

Glad to hear the slow fix worked. When a drive has the "slow" issue it is doing something during the idle time (between commands). It is searching for bad sectors, or a place to relocate bad sectors, or something like that. It locks up when it encounters a problem sector, and in your case even seems to go into device fault and require a power cycle (don't worry, you will find that area of the drive later in the recovery:). That makes my patch a bit difficult to implement, as I wrote it to read and write one sector at a time, allowing the drive to "hunt" in between commands. This makes is slow, but the reason I did that was because I found a USB adapter that would only work with the VSC commands one sector at a time. There is actually a way to do the mod02 patch with very little code, but I never tried that method.

Now I see you are using ddrescue 1.17. I would recommend using 1.19 or newer. Actually I would recommend using version 1.21-pre1 along with my passthrough patch. My patch can be found here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ddruti ... d_testing/
Also, a helpful understanding of ddresce here:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=172&t=1173
Normally I recommend using the scsi passthough with usb devices, but since you have been able to use hddsupertool to work with it, you should be safe to use the ata passthrough. Either way the patch will allow a special exit code when it detects a device fault. Since you program, if you could write a program that would run a relay to power cycle it, and then a script to call ddrescue, check for exit status and call the relay program, you would be all set. Then again, if you are very lucky, there will only be a small bad spot on the drive and none of that will be necessary.

[Spildit]

WDR should work fine on windows 7 as long as you use 32 BIT version (not 64) because the driver that needs to be loaded to gain direct I/O access is not signed and will not install on 64 bit windows.

Guess that the same goes for WDMarvell !!

Please DO NOT use WDMARVELL on the failing drive just yet. Not only it requires SATA/IDE PCB but also you should test first with drives that are not important for you, just in case you mess them up !!!

I think that you will have BIG CHANCES to get a huge portion of the data back with a SATA pcb + ddrescue in reverse cloning mode with cache disabled. The problem then will be to decrypt the data !!!

[Spildit]

VERY COOOLLLL !!!

VERY GLADDDD THAT IT'S WORKING !!!!

Hopefully the drive will now CLONE PROPERLY and you might only have issues with one sector or two trowing the drive off-line.

Let's see what will happen !!!

[fzabkar]

Module 02 consists of several sections which other HDD manufacturers refer to as Configuration Pages (CP). The mod02 patch involves switching off a particular CP. This can be done either by editing module 02, or by means of a special VSC that directly writes to a specified CP.

The following open-source Linux tool uses the direct approach. It was based on some work at WD's forum.

http://mod2patch.sourceforge.net/
http://mod32patch.sourceforge.net/

[koitsu]

Results are in: 100% success, no errors. SMART attributes for source drive also show no signs of read errors or pending sectors needing re-analysis:

Code:

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued:     2000 GB,  errsize:       0 B,  current rate:   39780 kB/s
   ipos:     2000 GB,   errors:       0,    average rate:   69733 kB/s
   opos:     2000 GB,    time since last successful read:       0 s
Finished


Code:

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   215   207   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       4208
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       101
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       115
10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       74
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       61
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       148
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   127   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       25
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0


In other words: mod02/mod32 patch somehow fixed this -- or alternately, rewriting mod02/mod32 on the drive somehow fixed it.

I'm absolutely ecstatic, and my colleague is as well. Now to check on everything NTFS-wise and do repair there, but that's all stuff I've done before so no help needed.

[Spildit]

WOW !!!

Very, Very Nice !!!!

And thanks to the HDDSuperTool it wan't even needed to swap PCB to SATA to send the VSC as the tool works well by USB !!!

Really, Really GOOD !


Way to go. It couldn't have been better.

Congratulations and thanks for sharing your experience as well !



Happy !

[Spildit]

Like watching a bad movie with an ending you can predict.

Are you sure ?



Guess what, @thatdellguy, this time you were .... WRONG !

[Spildit]

I'm absolutely ecstatic, and my colleague is as well. Now to check on everything NTFS-wise and do repair there, but that's all stuff I've done before so no help needed.

Goes without saying please DO NOT re-use the damaged drive. Do not assume it's fixed, just be glad that you got your data back and get rid of the old damaged drive, as it might fail again and next time you might not be able to get the data back !!!

[Spildit]

You simply don't have the knowledge, equipment, or experience to pull this off. It's nothing personal . . .

[koitsu]

Yeah I know about not using the drive that caused all the grief to begin with.

The destination/donor drive I used is also in 100% working condition (I always verify them with full range LBA read/write patterns before I do any restoration onto them).

I'll be showing my colleague how to zero the My Passport drive and then he'll be taking it to a E-waste facility for recycling; It's outside of warranty anyway.

Thanks everyone! You'll be seeing a new post from me with regards to another drive (yes, from the same colleague) that has a completely different issue (pretty sure it just needs a PCB + U12/U14 swap).

We can consider this matter closed and a success. "Like watching a bad movie with an ending you can predict" -- I guess that means he predicted success even though the film wasn't worth watching.

[Spildit]

Very nice indeed !

Looking forward to your next posts.

Have a nice start of the week !

[fzabkar]

How sweet it is! Chalk up another win to MacGyver. )))

Maximus, your HDD Tool really is Super! Kudos to you!

To the naysayers, Happy New Year.

(As for e-waste, the PCB could still be recycled on eBay.)

[Spildit]

(As for e-waste, the PCB could still be recycled on eBay.)

SURE !!!

DO KEEP the PCB for any future data recovery need or sell it on ebay to someone who needs it !!!

[maximus]

100% recovery is awsome!

Now I would like to analyze this a bit. I agree that mod32 was clear, and that my mod32 patch should not have changed anything. But mod02 record 27 offset 2 did have the value of 02. My mod02 patch would have changed that one byte to 0, which seems to be the big key to the slow fix. So the big question is why did this drive have that problem with no apparent bad sectors? It would appear that the drive was looking for sectors that were not available to a normal read. So if the slow fix is related to relocating sectors, is it possible that the drive was checking the place where it would normally reallocate to and found an issue? There must be bad sectors someplace on the drive that would cause the issue. Or maybe some other issue that we don't understand. What exactly causes the WD slow issue?

Anyway glad to hear of 100% recovery, and glad HDDSuperTool was helpful.

[thatdellguy]

We can consider this matter closed and a success. "Like watching a bad movie with an ending you can predict" -- I guess that means he predicted success even though the film wasn't worth watching.

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet as true"