Hi all,
I am new to this forum, so please excuse me newbie ignorance.

I have a 2.5" WD Scorpio Blue disk that does not work properly:
- spins normally,
- heads are not clicking
- electronics responds, at least disk geometry returns correct values
- Windows sees it as uninitialized
- sector reads return error on all disk

I have a donor disk, but I am not sure if it's going to help me if I change pcb, or heads, or swap the tellers.

I have heard, that there is some system area on the disk with part of the firmware that can get corrupted, and then no replacement will do any good.
Assuming that I am new to disk repairs, but I am not new to low level programming PCs and microcontrollers, and I am not afraid of new tools, how can I get this solved ?
Please don't respond with advice "send it to repair shop", I have no pressure to get this data back quickly, so I can play with it and learn somthing by the way.

Where can I get more info about low level disk structures and internal firmware details ?


Regards
Pawel

If your data is valuable for you , you have to go for some one specialized in Data Recovery and stop trying
about firmware details etc , you can read here in hddguru , google

_________________
Tawfeek Mokhtar
http://alsafwapc.net
Alsafwa Data Recovery Egypt

So do you NEED the data back, even if not quickly? Are you willing to lose the data with no hope of recovery in the process of learning something? Because if you continue on your own, there is a very good chance you could kill it for good. So we can only assume that since (according to your statement) you don't want to send it out for professional recovery, that you don't really need the data and are willing to lose it for good. Is that correct?

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The disk contains mostly photo archive, it is valuable but not worth $800, and I got such price quote from professional recovery service.
So I want to try to recover it by myself.

Spildit, thanks for the hint, I will try this MHDD/Victoria, as soon I will check what it is.
The disk is WD5000BPVT-80HXZT1

WWN:50014EE6ABEE0740
DATE:02 JUN 2011
DCM: HBOTJHN
DCX:1H19X55Z0
R/N: 771692

It is not encrypted.
Regular SATA disk taken out from notebook.

You can try to use HDDSuperClone to clone/image the drive. If you want analysis of the drive condition (which I recommend so you know what you are dealing with), you can run HDDSuperClone for about 15 minutes, and then either post the progress log or send it to me. With a 15 minute run on your drive I should be able to do a diagnosis.

Since this drive is from a laptop, do you know if it was dropped?

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Was the drive sent to this company for inspection and quote, or is this just a general quote price?

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Home of HDDSuperClone

Some notebooks can set a hdd user password.
You need to check in Victoria or Mhdd that is not the case as the symptoms would be exactly as you described in your first post.

I thought of that late last night after shutting down, and you beat me to it this morning. Being locked with a password fits the symptoms exactly.

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Is password management embedded in HDD firmware ?
I thought password is used for scrambling/unscrambling some information stored on the disk, and it's done by BIOS.
When I connect the disk to another computer, I should be able to read disk sectors, maybe scrambled, but it should work.
If I cannot read physical disk sectors, it would mean that firmware would block reading and waiting for password.
It's my friend's disk, and she says that she did not set up any password.
Of course she could have bought it with a password stored in the BIOS, and she wouldn't know it.
But I really doubt that cheap, popular hard drive has password embedded in the firmware.
If so, I wonder where is it stored, on one of the disk track, or in some eeprom on PCB.

The drive being locked needs to be checked first. Rule out the simple things first, as we do not know the whole story.

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@Falconetti_PL,
Check the disk with MHDD and post here the results.
Also Victoria can be used.

Also, from what notebook was it ? And what happened so that it was taken of the notebook ?

How can I check if this disk is locked ?
The notebook does not ask for password at startup.
It just stopped booting, it wants bootable media.
The MBR cannot be read by physical read from Windows (short C program, run with administrative privileges)
I am waiting for the info what model of notebook it was, but I am not sure if it does matter.

Detect it with MHDD and show info.

Does the owner did something before the problem started ? Maybe she was "taking a look at configurations " and later that happened ?

If it is locked, the MBR also won´t be readable.

The model matters, due to the way some brands encode the password.

Dump the drive's firmware modules using WDMarvel (already mentioned) or HDDSuperTool.

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?t=2435
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

Can you get a SMART report from the drive?

https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The disk was taken out of Asus X53S.

I am putting up together a PC with multiboot (Linux, Windows) to run all those tools you all suggested.
My computer that I am working on daily is too much loaded with important things to risk such experiments.
I will make some test and I will post some logs.

Here is something you can do with your current computer that will only take a few minutes. Download CrystalDiskInfo (the link was provided by fzabkar in previous post). You can choose to download the zip file version and extract it and run it without installing, or download the exe file and install it.

If possible remove all other drives attached except the one running the OS and this drive you are trying to recover (this is optional, as the following procedure will list the info of all drives attached and less drives will make a cleaner output).

Open CrystalDiskInfo, and in the top menu bar go to Edit and check everything in Copy Option including ASCII View.

In the same Edit menu click Copy. Now open/create a new text document and right click and paste (or use ctrl-v). Save that text file and either attach that file to a post, or paste it as code in a post.

This will provide us the SMART info along with the raw identify data. A few of us on here can use the identify data to tell if the drive is locked, and the SMART data will give us information about the health of the drive.

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I would just like to point out that the results of the identify device command from CrystalDiskInfo do not appear to be word flipped (little endian). They are strait up which is different then many other raw output formats. That is one reason I asked to make sure the ASCII View was checked, so that it could be seen that the results were not flipped. It can make a big difference in which bit you are looking at.

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Some time ago I requested that the author display the data in a way that matches the format in the ATA standards documents. That's why the words are byte-swapped and the rows and columns are numbered in decimal.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

The OP stated they were getting another computer around for all the testing. All I did was give a very simple way to provide us some data until then, and something that would only take a few minutes. Somehow that got blown up into a technical explanation, and then seemingly now deemed complicated.

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I have put up a PC based on Inter Atom (WAFFER), small factor, and I connected Seagate disk with Windows XP, and faulty WD on second SATA interface.
Windows starts loading and throws bluescreen.
So I cannot run any diagnostic software on it.
I have to try on different mainboard and maybe different Windows.
The WD is however detected on other machine with Windows 7 but on USB interface, and tools don't see it.