This WD2500JB - 00GVA0 is giving a hard time.

No clicks. Initializes on its own. Using PC3K.

Heads mapping is 0,1,2,3,4,5.
Can image all heads fine, except head 2.

The only way head 2 is reading anywhere on the drive is with ignoring ECC, which is garbage.

Any ideas on how to get 2nd head to read normally?

Thanks in advance

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Did head 2 pass a heads test?

Do you mean by issuing "heads tests" command in utility?

If this what you mean, then this command is not always accurate. Do not trust it all the time. I trust what I can read in DE with the respective head.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

If your H2 is not dead totally, maybe you can tune the adaptives to get a little bit more signal from the head, but this assumes you have deep knowledge about this modell to deal with adaptives....
The another way is to do the MHA replacement + alignment.

I can help if you want, but not remotely.

Janos

Get head 2 reading by swapping the headstack.

Jon

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I had a 6 head 500GB (Seagate, not WD) drive recently where head 2 was also faulty. I imaged the data from the working heads which ended up reading the vast majority of user data, once I had that I did a HSA swap and got the remaining data.

Like Jon said, do a HSA swap to get the remaining data.

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Data Recovery Cape Town

Sometimes these can be tricky getting the alignment right, since there are six heads.

If you haven't done a few before successfully, there is a bit of a learning curve. We developed a procedure that removes a lot of the pain and uncertainty. But it took some doing.

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I have done many HEs with the typical "one head not working, image what you can, and then do HE and image whatever head(s) were not working". Most notoriously seen in Zeus drives. Heads test in DE for Zeus or similar drives, typically give you an ABRT if cannot read with the respective head.

However, here is different. Head exchange did not help. It is doing the exact same thing.
Trying to read h2 normally, but it defaults into reading with ignoring ECC.

I doubt that it is alignment, because it should have behaved differently as far as I have experienced, as in unable to recalibrate, lose readiness easily or consistently, unable to read from more than just one head, etc.

As far as ROM adaptives, there aren't too many options to play with in the utility for WDC-cyl32 family, are there?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I've had dirty heads cause this problem. There may be some contamination on the platter that is fouling the replacement. It's somewhat remote possibility. I've repeatedly cleaned heads to address this problem because I don't have a good way of cleaning that platter surface.

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Jon, do you use a +99% isopropyl alcohol to do this?

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Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
Data Recovery Cape Town

So, generally speaking in the various WD cases you have encountered with this issue, after cleaning the head, were you able to image a lot of sectors, a couple, none before the respective head got dirty again? Just trying to get a sense of success, maybe like a percentage?!?

In my experience, cleaning heads was more of a waste of time and tedious work invested rather than good results consistently. I mean, of course, it depends on how damaged that particular surface is, which is hard to determine, but still mostly a waste of time and resources.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I've only one it a few times with success, and it hasn't worked more than it has.

The times that is has worked, I've had to re-clean and re-clean and I ended up getting most of the data (if I remember correctly). It was a pain to be sure.

But in the "leave no stone unturned" school of data recovery, at least you can eliminate it as the problem -- which is important too.

To the previous poster: Isopropyl is fine for most jobs, but there are special (expensive) solutions made for that express purpose.

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