HI

I've been struggling with WD Elements 2TB for quite a while trying to fix it and get it back to work, but it seems it's not going to happen - there is a part of the drive at the end where all the errors and bads are located and even after erasing waits they come back.

I realized that I can partition or cut that part of the drive and use only the good part.

What would be the best way to do this?
Thank you.

You could look at setting a HPA using MAXLBA in MHDD?
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02- ... al.en.html

But would you trust the drive with data?
Me, no I personally wouldnt unless it was either backed up or dont mind losing it.


Loki

I wouldn't trust it either. I think being in this business teaches you to have little faith, anything can happen. Especially with an already degraded drive.

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

thanks! I agree, the drive wouldn't be very reliable no matter what I do at this point, but, I might use it as an extra backup solution.

Nick, great quote you have in signature. Who's it from?

Napoleon

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

Napoleon! Fits well his character.

Regarding the drive, I cut the end of it and did a scan and it all looked fine, now I plugged it to my PC and it showed up with full capacity and when I try to format it I get an error saying 'system can't format the drive'.

What is going on?

If you successfully set an HPA, then the drive would not show up as "full capacity" in BIOS or Windows etc. It should only be reported as the new, reduced, capacity.

IMHO you need to explain more, giving actual values of original (full) size, size of HPA that you (tried to) set, then reported capacity afterwards, to ensure that the HPA really was set. Perhaps there is some kind of terminology problem here...


I can guess what might be happening, but without more details, that guess could easily be wrong. IMHO you need to give the details I mention above first.

With Proper tools you may diagnose and see which HEAD has all the bads or at least most of it


then AGAIN, with proper tools, you may disable it

proper tools (Gear) will do it, DIY am afraid not.

NOW, without those PROPER tools, you cannot also. seek a Pro.

good luck

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

yes, I'm not sure why it showed up in Win in full capacity (disk was not recognized when I plugged it in, so I went into Disk Management, but I couldn't get it to work that way.

My last attempt had been a success though! First, when MHDD recognized the drive, I confirmed that HPA worked, drive size had been reduced. Next I erased the drive. Then I wanted to format ntfs/partition it. Couldn't do it from MHDD. There is FDISK command but I would get "Arithmetic Overflow" error 2-3 times in a row, so I picked another boot CD with Partition soft, ran Norton Partition Magik and it all went well from there. So, now I have a smaller, but still functional drive, and I hope it will serve me for a while. I will only use it for stuff I don't mind to loose, of course!