I have a 40GB Hitachi drive, very simple, two heads. Came in clicking with bad heads. Swapped them out, and the drive comes ready. I started imaging and it would go through very quickly and then just stop. I generated a head map, and found it was having a difficult time when it hit Head 1. I deactivated that head and it just blazed through Head 0, and imaged everything in about 10 minutes. Going back to Head 1, I can't image in DDI, unless I have it ignore ECC errors. At this rate it will take an eternity to get it imaged. I pulled it apart again, and examined the platters carefully, but saw no damage at all. I have a solution here that I use for cleaning platter surfaces, and I used it on the platter and also I cleaned the head as well, just in case the head from the donor drive was dirty. Put it all back together and the same result. Just extremely slow on that one head. Any ideas of what might be the cause or any other suggestions to try? Thanks for your time.

Does it read with ignoring ECC only in that area or on the entire surface from that point forward?

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

In DDI, the only time I can even get it to semi image quickly (and it's still really slow) is when extending the read time out, activating internal read retry's, and forcing PIO mode. I still get quite a few skipped sectors peppered throughout and it takes forever. If I switch over to image ignoring ECC's, it will image all of the sectors but it's just too slow. It's like this throughout the drive. I haven't been able to find a clean spot to image from. This was my last good parts drive from this model, so I'm going to try and locate another one just in case it is an issue with that replacement head failing. That's all I can think of it being right now.

That was all I was going to suggest - faulty (or already dying) head 1 from the donor (though I don't claim to be an expert, you seem to have eliminated most other possibilities already).

Although I do not believe it is very effective, it was suggested in similar threads that cleaning the head and the respective surface may help.

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

Already did that.

It is just a matter of time before this drive will completely fail. If another set of heads doesn't help things, just be sure to target the key files first.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

I know. It wouldn't have been a big deal if it were just a few docs and pics. I was able to limp through and generate a bitmap and select the directory they needed, but that directory is 18GB's. That's half the drive.LOL

I just stumbled across this thread again, and just wanted to update it. The replacement heads I installed were just weak. I had another set of heads out of a 60GB drive, and they worked perfectly and I was able to get a full image of the drive in about 30 minutes with no errors.

Thanks for the update.

Loki

Good job

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners