I currently have a Royl WD that has 4 heads, when I start up the drive every blue moon it goes DSC DRDY, I can see the drive. When I check it on the HD Doctor for WD, I am able to pull of the firmware no problem and it goes ready. I check the heads and 1 head is bad. My question is there is a function to disable heads, can´t I just disable that one head he image with the other 3? or will disabling that bad head it will damaged the data on the other 3.

Not with HD Doctor you can't. Sure you CAN disable the bad head, but if you do that the drive won't initialise it's translator properly and will deny you LBA access.

4 Options:

1. Image with Deepspar Imager or Atola (assuming the drive does come DRDY and ID OK, and allow LBA access) after creating headmap.

2. If it will not come DRDY and ID, then use PC3000 UDMA to edit RAM head map and get it to ID and allow LBA access, then use DE to image H0,2,3.

3. Change heads

4. Send it to someone who has the correct tools and skills.

Of course options 1&2 will only allow a max of 75% image.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Thanks,

I did the head map on the drive, did a media test and it found the head that was bad. I took it out of the imaging setting to avoid any issue and started imaging. It didn´t get very far when it started clicking and stopped imaging. I tried a couple of times but it didn´t work, so I then connected the drive to a usb adapter and the drive came up. I used a fast copier to pass over the files, I was able to get many of the files. My question is why the DDI does not work with this drive and hooking up to a usb does?

usb is slow and and you can not pass data commands over usb mode
so it talks to it at a factory level.

it like all other tools its hit and miss sometimes



if you got Atola imager this should recovery your data only files no problems