Hi all,

I've done just about everything I can do on this drive and am at a dead end, if anyone has any ideas they would be very, very welcome.

WD1600BEVT-xxZCxx

Drive was in a laptop (switched off in the bag) that was driven over by a car at low speed. It was shipped to me and was clicking. After having a good look at it I could see no physical damage. Drive was acting like heads were dead so put in a good set. Drive initialised and ID'd and I start cloning and after about 3% the heads died. Click click. I had another thorough look at the platter and there is no damage visible, even when highly magnified. Was going to put in another set of heads but thought they would die just as quickly. At this point I removed all other elements that could be the problem. I configured a new PCB and moved the platter to a new HDA, and then put in new heads. Disk has new case/motor, PCB and heads. Powered up and made headmap and imaged in reverse. The back half of drive imaged perfectly. From 312 581 807 (end) to 150 000 000 (middle) it images perfectly, not one bad sector. When it hits the front half of the drive between 0 and 150 000 000 it has pretty much bad sectors all over the place, on both head 0 and 1.

This makes no sense. Can read SA fine, IDs and inits fine. 2nd half of drive images perfectly, but first half is very messy.

I've tried averaged adaptives (ROM 47th mod), regen'd translator, tried UDMA 33, hardware retries, backwards, forwards, and have since tried another set of donor heads to rule those out.

See the attachment below, this is how it's looking. The MFT won't image properly and a raw recovery gives me files which are obviously all corrupt.

Determined to crack this one...

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

PM Sent..

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

That's odd. Does it fail to read the bads if you manually try to read them (double click on them)?
It occured to me sometimes bads would read normal on manual read, so i chose to read on several passes after power off on and was able to eventually read most off them.

If you found a solution i'd love to hear it.

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

Am waiting for another set of donor heads. Will try them, failing which it's time for plan B. Or rather, at this point it's about plan F.

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

I seriously doubt that this is caused by weak heads. Good luck though, plz share the results.

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

Another PM sent...

_________________
Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein