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 Post subject: WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - reports 0 sectors
PostPosted: November 18th, 2021, 14:05 
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Joined: November 18th, 2021, 13:39
Posts: 2
Location: United Kingdom
Hi, I have had this 4TB drive for a few years, I noticed recently that some of the files I tried to save to it were getting corrupted. I did a surface can and ~50 bad sectors were found. I imaged the drive immediately and managed to recover 99% of the data from it so no data recovery is needed. Removing this drive from my system also greatly improved my boot speeds so it was likely causing system hangs too.

I wanted to see if I could fix the bad sectors, so using a combination of hirens boot cd and ultimate boot cd I ran a bunch of programs to see what the result would be. I moved the drive from my main PC (since the scans take hours and I didn't want it occupying my main PC) to an older laptop and connected it up using a combination of esata + power from a usb3 sata adapter.

full reformat and chkdsk /b dropped the bad sectors down to ~25
wd bootable lifeguard wipe dropped this down to ~20 (both the quick and extended tests in this software passed despite the bad sectors?)
hddregen dropped the bad sectors down to ~11 and this also seemed to fix the slow boots. I changed the bios from SATA to ATA for hddregen to run without errors.

I probably should have stopped here since the drive seemed to be useable again and all the bad sectors were located in the first 2GB so I could have partitioned the drive to ignore this area.

I then tried using hdat2 to do the same thing as hddregen but it seemed to get stuck straight away and would give a "drive not ready" error. I made a huge mistake here by seeing what creating uncorrectable errors would do. After a few seconds I stopped it since it seemed to be going really fast and swapped back to using hddregen. This took a really long time to scan each sector this time, after a few hours it had only managed to cover about 100. I then decided to start over and reformat again. After 2 days it was at 3% done so something had really gone wrong now.

I decided to cancel the reformat and look at the other tools again to see if anything could be done, but after a reboot the drive is no longer accessible. It shows up in the bios with the correct name. Windows can see the drive in device manager, but disk management does not let the drive initialise and just shows it as having 0 capacity. None of the linux tools from either of the live cds detects the drive anymore, they sometimes come up with errors saying drive reporting 0 sectors, using 63 instead.

When the bios is set to PATA the drive spins up on boot, after a minute or so it makes a noise like it is spinning down and then up again straight away, another minute later it spins down and does not wake back up again.
When set to ATA the drive will spin up whenever it is accessed, but will freeze the pc until it spins down again.

Is there any advice on how to proceed? If possible I would like to get back to the stage I had hit before attempting to use hdat2. As stated at the start the drive has no data I need to access, I mostly want to do this to learn what tools are useful in this situation.

Thanks for any advise!


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 Post subject: Re: WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - reports 0 sectors
PostPosted: November 19th, 2021, 8:03 
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Joined: November 7th, 2020, 5:31
Posts: 1084
Location: The_UK
kralia wrote:
Is there any advice on how to proceed? If possible I would like to get back to the stage I had hit before attempting to use hdat2. As stated at the start the drive has no data I need to access, I mostly want to do this to learn what tools are useful in this situation.


To summarize : You had an unstable failing drive spitting out bad sectors, you ran a bunch of tools which stress the drive even more in an attempt to hide them, it reassigned some of these bad sectors but started producing more. Eventually the died from the strain and now isn't recognised at bios level.

It's dead Jim. It was already dying and you thrashed it to death, let it rest in peace now.

_________________
Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/


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 Post subject: Re: WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - reports 0 sectors
PostPosted: November 23rd, 2021, 7:39 
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Joined: November 18th, 2021, 13:39
Posts: 2
Location: United Kingdom
Is there a way to diagnose what went wrong with it? I still want to learn from it if possible.

They are pretty complicated devices, but isn't it still just a chain of different tech and one of the links has broken?

I don't get the impression the motor failed since the motor still seems to work.

I understand some of these drives store important information on the platters and specialised tools are needed to access this area, but can tools like hdat2 modify this area to break the drive?

I realise there is no point opening the drive up since I don't have any of the tools or experience for dealing with the platters themselves, but I do have stuff like a usb->serial cable + arduino if they can access the drive in some other way (the 8 extra pins next to the sata data connector?)


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 Post subject: Re: WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - reports 0 sectors
PostPosted: November 25th, 2021, 16:36 
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Joined: November 24th, 2011, 21:48
Posts: 103
Location: Canada
Most modern HDD's automatically move data from one place to another if the sector is getting weak (eg: bad sector).
By running those tools you would have caused the HDD's own internal data moving process to effectively fight what you were running in software. This is extremely stressful and will wear a drive out pretty quick.

Those tools were designed for much older drives.
Bad sectors are not repaired; the HDD simply remaps the data they contain to a spare area on the drive and the brains of the HDD will not allow the computer to read that physical sector again. If your tools says it reduced the amount of bad sectors, it really didn't. The same physical sector is bad, the HDD is simply going elsewhere on the surface of the disk and reading / writing another physical location.

I would guess a head has failed or is very weak; most likely caused by the excessive amount of R/W done via software multiplied by it's own sector reallocation processes.

To further this case, you'd need tools to upload firmware components and then edit the head map in RAM. I'm fairly sure hdat2 cannot do that.


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