I have a WD Scorpio Black 2.5" SATA hard drive. The owner claims that he tried to simply reformat the drive and me to restore data. However, I am running into several issues that I have not seen and need assistance. Here is how things stand right now.

1. I can attach the drive to my Linux computer and see it in the drive manager as /dev/sdb
2. It ID's the drive as WD1600BEKT and displays the capacity as 160GB (no volume information)
3. When attempting to use dd_rescue to create an image of the drive I receive nothing but I/O errors and end up with a 0KB .img file
4. When using TestDisk to view drive information it reports nothing but bad blocks when trying to find volume information

I am hoping that I would not need to do a PCB swap or (worse) a head stack translator swap. But, I cannot figure why I would be receiving so many I/O errors. Has anyone else seen something similar and if so, how do you work with the drive.

Thank you in advance

Could be a bunch of different things. Send to a pro for diagnostic

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

PC-3000 reports no problems with the drive itself

How is that possible? You saying its reading all sectors as bad...

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www.datarecoveryne.com

Right, thats why you need to send it to a pro who can figure it out. PC3K generally can't/doesn't tell you what is wrong, it just gives you the tools to make your own determination

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Is the drive protected by a password?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

You get BAD BLOCKS like UNC, timeout or straight immediate ABRT on each LBA ?

It's much different.

@fzabkar - That is an excellent question that I did not ask the user. I will get that information.
@BlackST - I do not get UNC when attached to the DeepSpar imager and the PC-3000 shows the drive as ready and discovered. (i.e. blue lights over DRD and DSC and no ERR)
@harddrivespecialist - When running TestDisk and searching for partition information, it reports 'bad blocks'.

brownr26 - I still did not understand what error you got when you try to access any single LBA?
When you init drive with Victoria for Windows or in PC-3000 under the tool for the drive there are read ID it gave you information about status.
P.S. brownr26 you should not ask the customer you should take a look at drive status to see if it is locked, also PC3k also report when drive is locked.

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DataRecovery.bg

@Samo - NEW INFORMATION: I hooked it up to the PC-3000 again and now I see ABR and AMN errors. That is at least consistent with what I see in dd_rescue and FTK Imager. You are very correct about the drive being locked. I should have relied on PC-3000 but the drive's behavior wasn't matching what I expected so I went back to get more history from the customer. So, now I have to deal with the block errors. Thank you for the response.