Also as stated you can use Victoria for windows to disable the read cache of the drive (do not power it off and clone it as if you power it off/on the read cache will be re-set and will turn on) or if you clone the drive in reverse it will "bypass" the read cache as it will only cache formwared.

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@Spildit

Thank you very much for your detailed reply.
It looks very time consuming to me trying to delete the G-List on this specific drive without having a hardware solution.

Maybe I'll go for a hot PCB swap instead and before of course checking S.M.A.R.T if there are tons of pending secs.
But I'm afraid that I will not find what I hope.
I hope very much that it is not because of platter damage
The important data is exactly in this bad area

Another problem with this drive is, that it is randomly powering off and on again while imaging.
That's no problem for my imaging-solution, but of course for the read-ahead-cache flag in the firmware as you mentioned.

I'll try cloning it in reverse, because I cannot remember if I already have done that or not.

If you are willing to ship the drive to Portugal and pay something for the service i don't mind to attempt to clone the drive using my hardware cloning/imaging tool.

It would be interesting to test as well if my HRT-DRE card would be able to "extract" more data or read more sectors then your software only sollution ...

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IMHO yes

Thank you very much for your offer.
I will discuss that with the owner of the HDD.
If he is willing to pay, I will accept your offer in any case.
How much do you want for your service? You can send me a private message.

I would also like to see the difference between your hardware imaging and my software-only-solution
But for fairness you should make 2 images, 1 before firmware issue fixing (if there's something wrong) and 1 after

most likely not a FW issue

Hi there !
I don't think any firmware fix would be necessary as well.
I would charge the shipping costs to Portugal back to you only as i would like to test to see if the card would extract more data then your software as well.
As long as you pay for shipping costs it's fine,
Also you would have to suppy a drive to copy the image to or to clone the original to.

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ISTM that the OP only needs the area from 30GB to 35GB. That should fit on 1 or 2 DVDs, or a small flash drive.

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Sure.

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It's no problem, there's no need of DVD's.

I can also send to USB flash drives with a size of 64GB.
So the full image can be compared.

But before sending the HDD maybe I'm going to take another image (or at least near the bad area),
in order to achieve the best result.

Because the reading was so strange I initiated very big "Jumps" over the bad area.
At the end the "Jumps" were 1GB big to skip the bad area to prevent head wear.
But of course the "last Jump" may have led to a missing area behind the bad area.
I don't know how big this area is, maybe 10-100MB.
I will try to find out and possibly "correct" this missing zone in my image.

This post should not be interpreted as a justification in advance
I just want a "fair" comparison between hard- and software-imaging.

Ok !

Check PM.

This type of imaging is what i will do when i get your drive :

Hardware assisted cloning of a drive with Bad Sectors :

Imaging/Cloning with HRT-DRE :

Case study - Data Recovery from a 2.5 SATA Toshiba drive :

I will first try a fast imaging process to get all of the good sectors skiping the bad sectors, then i will do another pass to retrieve the bad sectors and get all the data that is possible to retrieve from them.

If you allow me to do so i will set multiple reading attempts at the end for each bad sector and copy out the data that is more often read on each bad sector, but this can kill the heads and i will do it only when all the other data that can be imaged is already on file.

I will as well check SA and defect lists/translator at the end if a "decent" image can't be done using the loaded translator.

If all looks well there will be no need for G-List clearing and/or translator regeneration.

At any rate i will post here as soon as i get the drive and will document the process of imaging and the steps done to image the drive.

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Any update on this one ?

I didn't recieve your drive yet....

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I hope I can send it today, because I go to the city today.
Please excuse the delay

I had some "problems" to fix and did not found the time last week.
The cloned destination drive had some errors on it.
This came to light when I cloned it to the USB flash drive.
It was only a few, but I did not want to "miss" this sectors.

Luckily I always make 1 "Image" and 1 clone, so I did not have to touch the original drive.
So I made a "freshly cloned hard drive" which I will send to you instead of the USB flash drive.

Thank you very much for your help again.

@Spildit:
The package was sent
I hope it will find it's way to you.

Ok then !

So you had send 1 cloned drive + original drive ?

Did you manage to clone any more data from 30Gb to 35Gb with your other attempts ?

I will be looking forward to get your drive and attempt to image it with HRT-DRE.

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It will be very interesting to compare your image/clone done with software only with hardware based imaging.
I will post here as soon as i recieve your drive and start working on it !!!
Regards.

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I have send you 4 drives:
The original drive, 1 cloned and 2 "spare drives" if you need firmware modules from them.
But please be aware with one of the spare drives, you will see that the PCB is somehow "repaired" in an unusual way.

I had decided not to make any other imaging-attempts with the original-drive.
I didn't want to risk head-wear before you have tried to image with your HRT.
So I still miss the mentioned area (30-35GB), but the zone behind went very well (35-38GB).

I still hope that the bad zone is unreadable because of firmware issues,
although I understand that the chance is very low.

I am also very very curious
I hope that the software will not perform too bad.
It will also be very interesting to see the time difference of the 2 solutions.
But I have to admit, that I cannot surely remember how many time it took.
Effectively it was probably only a few hours because of the "small" source (only 40GB).

Hello and thanks for the reply.

The 2 spare drives have the same model, family and FW version ? Most likely the problem is not firmware related at all and the only thing i can see afecting the drive like you described at a firmware level would be some sort of translator issue or zones issue where one zone would be un-readable or due to transalator/defect lists problems some sort of problem like LBA not translating to physical internal C/H/S and if a thing like that were to happen i couldn't borrow modules from a donor as the defect lists are drive specific the same as translator. I can clear the G-List if present and re-generate the translator for your drive, but most likely the problem is not related to that.

My bet is that the drive will hit a bad sector and will dropp off-line and a power re-cycle is needed to regain the capability of reading from that point on. If that is the case then HRT-DRE will have no problem with it and will clone past the bad blocks as long as the heads are still ok.

Do you want me to CLONE the drive to a spare one that you provided or should i create an IMAGE FILE on one of the drives ?

Regarding TIME i will clone in PIO so it might take 1/3 of a day to clone if there aren't many bad sectors and something like 2 days to extract data (if possible) from the bad blocks.

I will do a first pass skipping bad blocks and zones if several bad sectors are found consecutively. One read attempt and will decrese the value of the time-out for sector read and to soft-reset.

When the data from the good sectors are retrieved i will go for skipped sectors.

Finaly i will retry on the bad sectors several times and then this might kill the heads.

Let's wait for the drives to arrive and check what can be done. Hopefully i will get more data then with the software sollution but we have to test and see ....

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