Hi there.

I got a drive on there, it's a 2.5 inch WD5000LPCX.

The drive is detected by system sometime (unplug, wait 10 sec, plug it back)
It seam to have "moving bad sectors".

And for the moving bad sector part, it's like, you can see file, you try to copy and you get UNC and the drive eventually die while trying.
Unplug, plug back, mount, go try to get the same file : success!

It can also crash while browsing the FS... rebooting the drive and browsing the same location also succeed.

It seam to do it on all the disk surface, for anything I try to get.
When the drive get some UNC and decide to stop, well, it seam to stop the spindle before moving the head away (it make a cuik sound)

The initial event occurred while the drive was in a laptop. The laptop did crash (no hit/moving) then on reboot it stopped detecting it).

I suspect that it's head contamination (that could have happen on the initial crash) and that moving the actuator arm from another identical drive could allow me to get the data. I do not want to continue to ninja the files one at one as I fear it will just cause more damage.

Do you guy think I am right about head contamination? It's more that I have to order the little head combs from china before attempting to do the swap and it can take like a month.

Correction.

Errors seam to be a fixes location now that I did work a little more with the drive (they are just plentiful)

I am able to image the drive without it to make weird noise, I'm doing so skipping the bad sector.
Then after I will try to reread all these bad sector.

I did notice that each time I did meet a bad sector, the reallocation fail (even if there still space in the over provisioned zone)

All data have been extracted from the dead drive successfully.

I will keep the dead drive to practice messing with the SA with tools like WD Marvel.