Okay well maybe not SCIENCE, but learning!

I have a WD3200BEVT-75A23T0 (have a Toshiba drive also with the same issues, but spread out over the drive surface) out of a Dell laptop that had stiction. Me and my wise self decided to take the cover off and move the heads to the parking ramp while the drive was out with no power. No tools, just carefully moved them over, put the cover on and put it back in the laptop. Started up normal and backed everything up fine. I told the owner that he has to replace the drive because of the damage and replaced it about a week later. I then scanned the drive and did a few zero fills and came up with about 500 or so bad sectors in the 215-240GB range. Other than that, it runs fine. No clicking, corrupt data or slowness until I hit that spot. Once past ~240GB, it's fine again.

SO, I've come here to ask the HHDGurus how I can bypass this part of the drive, and maybe modify smart to quit halting my POST because it's tripped smart. This isn't a drive that will get sold off or anything since it's useless for anything other than learning purposes. I'm just going to slap Linux on it if anything and use it for non-critical stuff. I could just create a 200GB partition, but that's too easy for me. I'd rather mess with it and learn things like HPA, DCO and firmware tweaking than just toss it.

I cant go for expensive HD repair tools and firmware software, but if I learn enough, maybe I'll start a HDD recovery biz! Okay, maybe I wont risk other peoples data playing doctor...

I can dream cant I?

Thanks guys.

It was done in a giant ziplock bag and I was wearing gloves with the bag sealed around my hands (still not a clean room, but better than open air). I don't think it took me longer than 10-15 seconds before the cover was replaced immediately after the heads were parked. I should have posted that in the OP (I've actually done this type of repair more than once). I know this drive isn't trust worthy so no critical data will be placed on it. Just an install of Linux to use over time and see how the drive fails (if it ever does) and to use tools like MHDD to alter the drive.

Honestly, I don't care if it dies. But since it still works, I'd like to learn something with it while it is working lol.

Worked on drives always fail again it's just a matter of time. Even if you could bypass that area, the heads may still be getting damaged every time they pass over the damaged zone. It's not unusual in cases of stiction to have to change heads multiple times to get all the data. You were already fortunate that you got that much data.

Scrap the drive. Trust me.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

The thing you might want to try is get a ttl adapter and talk to the drive through terminal and learn and play with the commands. You can find some interesting stuff, but if you enter the wrong command you'll brick the drive for good.

That reminds me, I should get back to playing with my drives soon too

Well, limited the drive to 400,000,000 sectors (~200GB) and all tests return no problems with reads or writes, and full read and write speeds. So that solved problem 1, now SMART OFF isn't working to remove the POST errors.

I'll try the HPA on the second drive, but limited to 350,000,000 sectors. Smart has not tripped on that drive (shows 1500+ reallocated sectors LOL), which is odd because the WD tripped at 500 (must be a manufacturer to manufacturer design threshold).

Anything else I could poke about? I'll do all my potentially destructive stuff on the Toshiba (MK2565GSX).