HDD GURU FORUMS

Hello everyone,

I just got my first PC 3000 UDMA kit two days ago and managed to get my first recovery going - at least I think.
Unfortunately, trainings aren't available at this time because of covid so I have to bother everyone else with my probably dumb questions.

Quick Run-through:
slow working WD2500BEKT-66F3T2 from a dropped external hard drive, Head 1 is pretty much dead and needs to be replaced.
before a head swap attempt, I decided to recover as much as possible from the other heads.
also used a "Used sectors map" to save some time.

my Target drive is a brand new Intenso Portable SSD - connected via USB 3.0

this process just finished and I was wondering if it worked.
So I closed the task and unplugged the SSD to review on a laptop.

Well, the drive was not initialized by windows. and I might panicked a little bit that all that time was wasted and wondered where else it could have copied that files.

here it gets blurry - in Data Extractor Explorer I could review the file structure and everything from the WD Drive
not sure what I've done - but now the drive gets displayed differently as -

- 0 - PC3000 SATA0
-1(EE)EFI GPT
-0[FF]-(Windows) Reserved - Microsoft reserved Partition

I've done a quick disk analysis and got at least the NTFS filesystem and Root structure back.
But also the finished jobs of the recovery process- like the Status and Processes Tab disappeared, they are empty now.

the Questions -
What happened to my recovered Data on the SSD? How do I access it?
What happened to the finished Jobs in Status and Process - I thought PC3000 Tasks everything you've done gets saved forever (until you delete the task files)
Can I change the Target volume or do I need to create a new task for it? (In case the SSD job didn't work - I would have just plugged in another HDD to SATA1 for Target)
What happened to Explorer File structure? did Windows somehow tried to initialize an HDD plugged into PC3000?

again, sorry for the dumb questions - these are my first steps with PC3K and all I got are youtube videos, forums, and Ace lab Blog.
hope somebody understands what's happening and can answer my questions

Thanks a lot in advance

To answer the basic question, PC-3000 with make the target drive offline and also change the MBR to make your target drive not recognized by the OS so Windows does not interfere with it. You can change both these settings in the copying tab in DE Parameters.

Uncheck the offline box and the MBR box.
Then manually change the MBR to 55 AA from 55 BB.
Your target drive should then boot after refreshing in Computer Management.
Or you can quickly scan the target drive with R-Studio (or similar) to find the data.
Or you can save the data imaged in DE to another target drive directly from DE.
Remember the SSD is just being used to create a sector by sector image of the data.
PC-3000 does save all tasks. If you go into the main DE window it should be saved the recent tasks.

Thanks a lot! I've seemed to have overlooked that. Data is there and the drive working - Thanks!

Let us know if you need more help.

If you haven't already, download the DE user manual. It's ideal for a reference but not so useful as instructions or a how-to. There are a couple of members who have done quick youtube guides on specific issues and Aces Blog is much the same, Aces tech support is gear towards problem resolution rather than training and they were far too fast for me to follow I found one members very long live streams useful; there's no substitute for experience though so grab a pile of test drives and a comfortable chair.