I need some pointers into a right direction, please.

Problems started when win7 suddenly froze during boot at a splash screen, even safe mode was freezing after loading CLASSPNP.SYS. I finally tracked it down to my WD Green (it's not a system drive), unplugging it lets windows boot up. Then I tried hot-plugging it, it appears immediately in device manager, but disk management is unresponsive for several minutes. Eventually the drive shows up as raw. Event logger is full of timeout errors.

Tried sever HDD diagnostic tools, but SMART data seems inconsistent. Reallocated sector count value jumps between 0 and 200 on different reads, and current pending sector count is sometimes 0, sometimes 23, sometimes 35.

Tried MHDD, it can see part of the drive (had to set IDE mode in bios), scanning throws UNC errors once in a while, but I haven't scanned the whole drive. I don't know what else to do with this tool, really.

The HDD is WD30EZRX-00DC0B0, firmware 80.00A80. Spinning up sounds are normal, in my opinion. What's my next step, how can narrow it down? Can it be PCB? If the drive is unrepairable, is there any way to access data, clone it to another HDD?

It seems that the drive is developing bad sectors.
How much of the drive have you scanned with MHDD?

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Maybe 1%, had about 30 UNC errors. Could bad sectors really cause it to be this unresponsive in Windows?

Yes. It may also causes FW problems, and makes the OS goes crazy.
The data is very important?

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Right, didn't realize the FW is stored on the platters too...
The data isn't irreplaceable, but I don't want to give up without trying Since I am able to make a scan, I should be able to clone whatever is left, no? What kind of cloning tool would handle the bad sectors?

Hi, you can try "Media Tools Pro" a dos prog or DDrescue in Linux...DDrescue probably the better one on bad sectors.

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Thanks, DDrescue looks like something I might want try eventually.


Started the CX command, I'm not sure how long it's supposed to run, but in 10 minutes average access time was 11.12, maximum 19.95. Is that good or bad?


What's the alternative?

If the drive is extremely slow to respond on all sectors (not just the bad ones) it could be a firmware glitch related to the bad sector re-allocation which makes the drive slow down until it eventually stops responding completely. The firmware fix is relatively easy if you have access to any firmware tools like PC-3000, MRT Tools, DFL Tools, or DeepSpar Disk Imager. Might also be possible with certain software I'm told, though I've never tried it since I've never had to do it that way.

I would try ddrescue and just see what sort of result you're getting. Here's a tutorial I've written that might help: https://www.data-medics.com/forum/how-t ... -t133.html

See what sort of read speeds you get. If it's just bad sectors you should see some times where it's able to read at a pretty good speed (like 30+ Mb/s). If it's consistently reading at 1Mb/s or less, probably needs the slow responding FW fix.

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

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29187&start=20
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?t ... 4345#p4345

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod2patch/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod32patch/

WD Marvel (US$15 for one month licence) has a single-click solution to "deal with slow responding".

Scott Dwyer's HDDSuperTool also has a script for applying the "slow fix" to WD drives.

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks everyone, that's a lot of information to go through

In the meantime, I left HDDScan running as I went to work, and this was the result at the end of the day:


And the SMART values reported by HDDScan at the moment:


It took a little under 10 hours to scan the whole 3TB, that makes about 110 MB/s average. Do I understand correctly, that I don't need a "slow fix"? Should I just try to extract the data with ddrescue to a clean drive, or is there anything else I can look up? Like, how can I find out if the firmware is damaged, is there an address I can look up, checksums or something like that?

something doesn't add up, your HDD supposed to have almost 6 billion sectors and on the report i see only around 23 million

If firmware is ok, what do you think is causing Windows to freeze up on boot when this drive is connected? And if hotplugged while I'm already in Windows, everything slows down, and there are countless errors in the event viewer: "The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period".

Also, you're right, the count in HDDScan are 256-long blocks, it did in fact scan the whole 3tb drive.

Thank you again for a thorough explanation, this makes sense now.

I did in fact ran a "read" (not verify) on HDDScan, so it should be a good indicator of how long it might take to clone it. But I'll leave the drive alone for now, until I get a second empty drive to clone to.

much better now

of course i read it, keep up the great stuff

A short follow up, ddrescue worked very well, the drive is cloned. I didn't have patience to perfectly recover all 3TB, so I ran it with no-split, and there were about 130 errors in the end. Partition table was fine, but NTFS records were damaged. After playing around with variety of tools, I managed to bring it back to life with checkdisk without having to copy the data over to a 3rd drive. Curiously, all the files seem to have moved into the System Volume Information folder! Had to go to Linux to move them out, as Windows wouldn't let me delete anything in that folder.

Any ideas what to do with the old drive? Can I somehow mark down bad sectors and just use it for garbage storage?