Out of interest. Has anyone found reading this way, yields good results?

Practically it has been possible to use this to read data from heads that would normally give all bad sectors and find a lot of the sectors do contain correct data.

An example would be:

Recently experimented on a WD drive which would spin up and then quietly slip into Kernal mode after around 10 seconds.

After editing the head map to disable head 2 the drive would come ready OK in normal mode, Read + backed up SA from 0 & 1 OK.

The drive would give poor results on imaging through DE. IE: 90% bad sectors on heads 0,1,3 but with no surface damage to the platters.

After which a quick head map edit to re-add head 2 WITHOUT powering the drive off and reading without CRC control, all heads began to image ok. Head 2 also read, not with as much data but was able to grab the odd sector.

In a live case say where a client was unable to afford cleanroom time etc have you found this a viable way to grab that little bit extra to hopefully image the data required.

Cheers