Hello,
I've some problems with a WD My Passport (WD5000BMVW-11AMCS2) 500GB hard drive.
This hard drive reading was too slow (at beginning, peak at 200 kb/s, after it was below than 50 kb/s). I tried to copy on another hard drive using ddrescue (I use linux) and I recovered 1 GB after many hours but I stopped the copy because of head which makes some little noise which didn't prevent reading. I also tried to copy MFT and locate some files (this hard drive has just one NTFS partition, and I located beginning of MFT on third GB) but hard drive was too slow to recover it.
I found some posts that the module 32 has a problem and hard drive makes a big list of sectors to reallocate, and module 2 for SMART. So I used hddsupertool to patch module 32 and module 2 (hddsupertool made a backup), and after power off/on hard drive, hard drive doesn't respond (I can see /dev/sdc which appears and correspond to this hard drive, but when I try to read a sector, it doesn't end)
I think that I patched the Service Area (SA), how can I apply the backup?
There are some pins in front of this hard drive (I opened the case), 2 pins on right, and 2 rows of 6 pins on left. I didn't found their interests. I have a usb/TTL converter if I may use a serial port to access to data.
Thanks in advance,
Nuliel

probably weak head/s
without proper equipment, no DIY.
If your data are valuable for you, find some DR service

Thank you jerovsek
My data isn't valuable for me (not enough to send it to a DR service), that's why I posted this message to know how I could apply backup of SA.
I know that I might lose the contents of the hard drive, but I want to try, understand and learn.

Likely the mechanical problem has to be addressed first (cleanroom work) and need conversion to SATA with compatible PCB. That model drive is not so easy to work with.
Once that happens, perhaps you can use firmware tools like WDMarvell and so on.

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

Ok, thank you.
What is the interest of doing a conversion to SATA? Is it because of proprietary usb connector? I've read that all is ciphered on this hard drive, and usb bridge decipher data. When swapping PCB, I think we must transfer cipher key, isn't it? And maybe also content of flash chip?
I've watched some videos and I've seen it's hard.