Thank you for replying.
pepe wrote:
you were told the answer and still asking such questions...
I was raised to never stop asking questions and why, not accepting one answer as an inquestionable truth, so I think we can blame that on my parents, teachers and country education system
I recovered data from many situations were ACE said it was weak or bad heads, and head exchange was the only solution, but data was recovered using a completelly different approach. Some examples were fixed using AFH/DAC, which ace strongly doesn't recommend. They surelly have a lot of knowledge and TS support is great, but certainly not to a point that what they say is unquestionable.
I also consider they look at it remotelly and they have a lot of requests, so they have limited time for each case.
What I find strange is that H0 SA is read very fast, without a single bad sector, while user area have all sectors UNC. Hdd is stable, doesn't produce knocking sounds, air filter is clean. Doesn't feel right. If H0 is so weak at least some bad sectors should have appeared in H0 SA read. And even considering the higher UA density, I think at least 1 or 2 sectors should read from UA. I tried 5.000.000+ UA H0 reads, high timeout, single sector read, from different areas of the platter, all UNC.
Maybe there is a fw code that disables H0 if some read/write test does not return 100%. Like windows block all data access if some $mft cannot be fully read. A lot of hdd vendors block all UA data access when g-list overgrows. This is a perfect example of stupid coding. Maybe there is something like this blocking H0 to read UA. But I might be wrong in this feeling. I'm not an expert in this SA, that's why I tried asking here.
And since both head examination and exchange procediments are very intrusive, I think asking before trying that is the best way to go.
So question for me is still open, if anyone have other suggestions please share them here 
Otherwise as data is not urgent nor very important and I already have partial results, plan is to examine heads a few days from now and try to clean them if no other non intrusive options are available. Rumors say that next Seagate utility version might allow Seagate hot swap. And it is about to be released soon, so maybe that's a better option before messing with the heads.
Thanks again and best regards
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HDDGURU FILES
I also recovered numerous drives that they deemed unrecoverable for some reason.
