Hi all,

Currently working on a WD10EARS-00Y5B1 DragonFly 2. Drive would take about 30 seconds to come ready from bsy in PC3K when powering up. Would init and ID fine eventually. When ready it would not give any access to data, all ABR ERRs. Backed up all resources at this point, took ages but got good copies of all of them. Worked with it for a few hours. Checked module integrity at this point and some modules weren't being read fully, one of them being translator.

Found a suitable donor and did a hot swap (had good copies of modules from earlier) and after hot swap drive seemed good, could access data as had good translator. Started imaging in reverse and it took 2 days (50 hours) to get from the end of the drive LBA 1 953 525 167 to about 58 000 000. Up to that point it imaged 100% with no errors, albeit a bit slowly.

At 58 000 000 is where thing go bads. Anywhere between the start of the disk 0 and 58 000 000 it's not reading very nicely. Tried deselecting heads but no difference. Same problem across all heads. I have readiness timeout at 150ms and jumps to 10. Have many different combinations. At this point it's taking 20 seconds to get through one page of DE map at a time. I'll get all that I can with the drive in it's original state then swap out heads.

I'm interested to know why only the outer tracks are giving problems?? Weak heads and harder to read outer tracks due to faster rotational speed?

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

You have PM

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

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This is interesting Nick.
I worked 2 days ago with a DrgnFly2 ( WD10EADS-00M2B0 ) ,Drive was droppen down, so my hopes where small, but in 24hours DE imaged the 98-99% of the drive, so i reconstructed the filesytem and i had the partition of the customer, i had a luck.
But your case is really interesting..the translator was not corrupted, did you hot swapped with patient' translator?

Another PM sent your way.

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Thank you, gents, for the useful information.

As mentioned I performed hotswap and got over 90% of the data. I did many runs with different parameters and then eventually wasn't getting any more on subsequent runs. I gave the advice from PMs a try, no such luck.

At this point it was headswap time. Upon opening the drive I saw slight scratches on the outer tracks. Owner confessed to dropping it after me providing this information. Went ahead with headswap and tried to clean up which surfaces I could get to. With new heads I got a little bit more data, but not much.

All in all the required data was recovered, so happy ending.

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