Hi,

I'm running into an issue with this drive. Right now I have it hooked up VIA USB, upon starting it up it's generating these faint ticking noises whenever I believe it is trying to read. It's showing the 2 partitions on the drive but I cannot read them. I have tried loading up GetDataBack and one of the first errors it says is something about the Boot Sectors, the program won't run on the drive as it gives constant Error 23's and just causes the program to hang.

Would swapping the PCB help anything? I would need to replace the ROM info on the new PCB, correct?

Or is this likely a head issue? Reading reviews on this drive now, I see people have lots of problems with the boot sectors/main sectors and the drive itself just seems very unstable. I have a perfectly matching donor drive which works fine, is it possible to do either a head or a platter swap to retrieve my data if that's the final solution? What would this typically run considering I have the donor drive taken care of?

I'd appreciate any info/guidance.

Thanks

Hi,
I had a drive that does error 23 in GDT. It is an I/O error, and it was probably caused be me messing with the translation tables.

Might be heads, though a pro would need to diagnose.

BTW, a platter swap wont help as the platter is where your data is.

I don't know if those drives have terminal output, maybe look into that and see if a terminal output can give a hint.

Appreciate the reply. What exactly does an I/O error mean, what on a hard drive would influence that because that seems pretty broad.

How would I find if these drives have a terminal output? I have dealt with the terminal output of a drive before, I purchased some tool to hook up and get into the terminal of one of my WD drives awhile back but I'm not sure if this is the same concept.

I/O error means, that your operation system is unable to do Input/Output action (reading or writing data). Most likely it is damaged Read/Write heads.

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Think before you act => Most of the time there is only one chance for recovering lost data !

Luckily there's no terminal to mess around. If the 'faint click' is at start with no data request from host the problem is internal (it should not show on bios) , if the drive is shown on POST the problem is bad sector, media, heads or a blend.

"I/O error" is like you turning the keys to your car and it doesn't start, so you tell the mechanic "car doesn't start" as you guess it doesn't tell you a whole lot about the actual issue.

it seems a whole lot of people believe that all HDDs can be fixed by playing with the PCB or ROM, or there are magical commands in terminal mode that will fix a hard drive.

The lucky few % this is true for keep the dream alive for everyone else.

If your data is not important, thus not going to a professional, you might try running MHDD, available in this forum somewhere.

Also a possibility is hooking a sata connection to it. There are details about this concept on the forum too, though I personally don't think either option is going to fruitful. You might save a bit from a pro having the donor, though most of the cost is labour charge and expenses keeping the business running with tools, clean room, paying the well trained people, rather than the donor costs, so keep that in mind. And each company sets their price so contact a few.

BTW, did you do any large transfers lately like a few hundred Gb or any thing?

I have had 3 separate instances where drives have shit themselves after doing a long copy operation.

first was transferring an old 500Gb full of DATA to a new 1.5Tb. brand new, about 60% of the way transfer failed, drive corrupt. I reformatted it and it is behaving strangely.

Different drive, about a month old, transferring 110Gb ISO's of school performances to it (on a server hard disk) and same thing.

again a 3rd time, but was only 55Gb, though small files, pictures and small movies.

I don't do these type of transfers anymore, prefer to do it in stages of 30Gb or so.

@HaQue..... what software are you using to transfer the data???

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East Anglian Data Recovery Services
http://www.eadr.co.uk

"If it's your only copy - then it's not a backup!"

just windows explorer

I appreciate the replies.

I went ahead and tried MHDD, I wasn't exactly sure what I would accomplish in there but I've got what information what I could. I also tried running a scan utilizing MHDD, now it did scan through all the sectors (after skipping through multiple hiccups).

When the drive started scanning, it would run, majority of the sectors seemed to be reading fine with the majority under <3MS and then almost like clockwork there would be these "hiccups" where I could actually hear when the drive "hiccup" / click and then the reading abruptly stops. I would have to skip through 10k sectors to get past the hiccup and the reading would continue, then almost like clockwork/a full oscillation, the reading hiccups again thus needing to skip. I would have to skip around 50+ times by the end of the scan for it to complete.

When connected by Sata, the bios pauses to catch up on reading the drive on start up, the drive is recognized by Windows but the drive itself is not accessible - stating - it's not a recognized file system.

I've attempted to use GDB but again, scanning would start and start to recognize file types however the drive would start to hiccup/halt the program and since there's no way to actively cause the program to do a hard skip, the program just seizes up.

If I attach the drive through USB - it correctly displays the 2 partitions of the drive which there should be but still it is not accessible. Is MHDD capable of doing a sector-sector copy or are there any programs out there that are fitting to do any kind of clone with a drive like this?

I've attached some pictures of what information I could get from MHDD.

If anyone has any input on this I'd really appreciate it.

I believe that your best DIY chance is with ddrescue.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Either the disk is developing a media problem, degraded head OR it has been kicked HARD (my bet is on 3rd)

The risk is that it will die during the DIY copy with free stuff (becomes unresponsive, if there is MD it will start clicking and it dies OR it "dies" anyway) but you'll never know until you try.

I would not recommend it but it's me. GOOD LUCK.

I haven't used it, so I cannot speak from experience.

Does it have a way to turn of bad sector re-allocation and SMART updates while imaging?

If not, while it may be a "best chance" for DIY, it may also turn out to be a "last chance." Pounding away at bad sectors may cause the drive to become unrecoverable by anyone. We see drives all of the time from service providers that might have had a much happier outcome, had they sent it to us first.

Hardware imagers are designed to get the data off of failing drives quickly and with maximum yield. There are real limitations to DIY, and folks with bad hard drives should be informed of the typical differences in outcomes between DIY options and professional recovery, when bad heads or media damage are suspected or indicated.

The vast majority of drives sent in for recovery had head / media issues now-a-days, so that ought to tell you something.

Jon

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

NO.

That's why it sometimes kills unstable drives.

We barely see drives without media damage any more!

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Murphy was an optimist

Datarecovery in Belgium, Holland, France and Germany
Datarecoverytools http://www.drtools.eu

Got working on one today without media damage, a Momentus, miracle...
Well let's see if it lasts at least. Hope I did not jinx it.

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

Except the obviously dropped drives (many) , the rest are all DIYed to death in the PCB or firmware department.

Diagnose fee in advance, thank you....

Sounds to me that the drive has a bad head.

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

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!