Hello!
I've just received the replacement board for my "experiment" disk (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25825).

I've flashed both U8 and U12 with the original dumps and now once attached with USB I can see and mount the disk (it takes a long time to mount it)!
I've suddenly unmounted the disk and made a dump to file of the first 10MB and I can see the start of the NTFS partition
Keeping it unmounted I've started to copy the disk using ddrescue but after few MB (361MB) the transfer rate (that started at 2000kB/s) has decreased to 234kB/s and is costantly slowing down... The transfer is not locked but it's terribly slow! Error count is 0 (zero) so it seems that there are not read errors.

Is there a better way to clone my drive?
Before replaceing board, I've needed to bypass USB, connect the drive using SATA and recalculate translators in orter to make the drive rensponsive... May be the translators are going bad again? Is it any way to recalculate them from USB or I'll need to bypass the USB again?

Any advice is really appreciated!
Best Regards
Paolo

I can think of several possible reasons, but with my level of knowledge, the testing to try to find the specific cause has risks (as does any DIY recovery, like yours). You also described a similar slow-down on April 30 in your previous thread, which was not diagnosed according to that thread, so this may not be a new problem.

I may not be able to help, but in case your problem is a known issue - what is your exact ddrescue command line?

This explain a lot about the overall condition of the disk, but also I have a feeling that something went wrong or not addressed correctly using also wrong tools / procedure but this is just my idea.

I'm afraid the only thing to do is to clone the drive - if you can - with what you have, even if it dies during the process it shouldn't be a problem (should ?)

It is a case where PC3000 and DE or DDI do help, but it's pointless.

could be:
1- Bad Head (dying, if not dead already)
2- Bad Sectors (plenty)

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

Hello.
The drive is near to terminate to die. For this cases, where the drive can be mounted, I use Puppy linux tahrpup. It mounts de drive properly and you can just copy your files to a new hard disk.
If the disk disconects, It shifts one letter, when re-mounted from hdb1 to hdc1 for example. This is fastest than imaging or coping the whole drive with ddrescue, and risking to have it die in the middle of the process. To get files from problematic folders, you have to copy in command line, when you can't do it on the gui file manager.