Hi,

I'm trying to recover a DISH DVR 921 hard drive. It is a maxtor 250gb ata/133 hard drive. Recently the drive started making large sounds, until the receiver itself finally crashed. It uses a version of linux with 5 xfs partitions. I removed the drive and put it in my PC. I ran norton ghost to recover the partitions, but on two of them it would go until near the end and 'freeze', even with ignore bad sectors option on. I tried freezing the drive physically, but it didn't seem to have an effect. I then read some forums and tried using some programs without windows. CloneMaxx wasn't able to start. It did detect the drives and initiate the cloning however remained stuck at 0%. I then tried Ease US disk copying. This got to 69% then became unbearably slow. I now am running MHDD scan and I see slanted streaks of 'X's whenever I hear a knocking sound. (This happens seldomly just at certain times.) I assume this means data on one platter is unable to read for certain portions. I read on this site that HDD duplicator is another program I can try. Basically I'm trying to clone onto a spare working 250gb drive I have and hope there are enough readable sectors for the DVR to recover. Any advice? Some other program I should use? I read that remap sectors may be what I should try? Should I try to hold the drive at 1 celsius when reading from it? (I read about that in the stickied comparison between HDD recovery tools)

Thanks,
K

I ran MHDD and get ~1k UNC errors, then I ran it again with remap and got four times as many. I think definitely that it is some physical, head-related problem..

thanks,
k

Hi,

I would not do anything write-related on a drive like this.
Just make the image with a good skip value till it is possible.
regards,
pepe