Hi,
I have two of these drives presenting with the same issue that I would like advice on the best approach for data recovery.

Neither drive is experiencing the clicking associated with a stuck head.
Both drives appear to spin up.
Drives appear in gparted/gdisk but show 1.8TB instead of 4TB
Drives were originally working, and formatted as EXT4 and showed as 4TB in gparted / gdisk
Drives were formatted as RAW rather than partitioned.

SO from my ignorant perspective, and I would appreciate feedback on this, these are my observations
-the motor seems okay, it spins up. I am not familiar with motors being an issue provided they spin up/down, which this one does.
-the PCB seems to be working as the drive presents within Linux
- I would assume that the platters would be okay, barring an issue with the heads

This would leave me with the idea that probably, potentially, a head has come off or been damaged.

I had a brief look in the drive, and saw the heads were parked. Beyond that I put it back together for later investigation.

If I remove the heads from the park position will I need a comb to keep them separated ? I have heard of DIY pieces of plastic but I haven't seen any youtube videos on specifics.

I have had about 4 or these drives fail for different reasons, and I have more drives which I could possibly use as donors if necessary (I built a 7x4TB ZFS array with 2 spares, so I could pull the worst one).

This is a hobby so I do not have the money for professional recovery, but I lost 1 drivesout of a 3 disk mergerfs/snapraid array , and when I next rebooted, prior to a sync I lost the other drive.

Any input/help on the best approach and diagnosis would be apprecaited.

Thanks

Yeah, hit first, then ask. The method rarely left its users in trouble
regarding your drive: it is unlikely to be a head problem, at least originally, but now that you opened it, you can expect to have it sooner or later. Check if you have LBA access, with a hex editor. Problem is likely related to HPA...

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

4TB - 2TiB = 1.8TB

It appears that your drives are in a USB enclosure that has a 32-bit LBA limitation. Alternatively, if the drives are connected to a SATA port inside your computer, then the BIOS could have a 32-bit LBA limitation, or the SATA controller could be set to RAID mode, or your SATA driver could have a 32-bit LBA limitation.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

You really shouldn't have opened it. Drives with stuck heads don't click and don't spin either, don't mess with the heads, or try swapping with donors you'll just end up killing more drives.

That maybe but you could have had a diagnosis free of charge and if no fault found the drive returned to you. Had there have been something straight forward the recovery would have been very cheap - now you'll be looking at an open drive fee.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Thanks all, I'll grab my old laptop with esata and plug the drive in to it and see what it says.

It definitely didn't work when plugged in to the lsi9003 so I'm confident it wasn't the data to usb adapter.

I appreciate your perspective and I assume you're in the trade but I don't have the money for recovery so that was never an option.

If you have anything constructive to help me I'd appreciate it.

CrystalDiskInfo will retrieve (or would have retrieved) the real capacity of the drive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/index/smart/

Your HBA, or HBA driver, appears to have a 32-bit LBA limitation.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I have just tried my Vostro 3750 esata port with the disk and Linux displays nothing with dmesg, gparted or gdisk.

Windows seems to see it but wants to initialise it, which I don't want to do.

Phpbb doesn't seem to want to allow me to attach the photo so here is a link. https://photos.app.goo.gl/YU3ho87y1VuQ7yp6A

Does crystaldiskinfo give you anything for it?

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

Show us the Partitions tab in DMDE.

https://dmde.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I need to apologise to everyone for wasting their time. I am confused as to whet has occured and why, but it must be my error.

My original diagnosis path was that Linux was not mounting the filesystem. I ran gdisk -l and the disk wasn't present.

I tried removing and reinserting the drive, not no avail. I tried rebooting, to no avail, I tried shutting down, waiting and booting to no avail.

This made me believe the drive was dead.

For some reason I have plugged the drive in to my laptop and it has appeared, and after an fsck appears to be functioning well enough to transfer the data.

I have no idea what happened, or why, but I am just grateful and thankful.

I apologise if I have wasted your time, I have no explanation or understanding for what has happened.

Thanks for the offers of help, information and diagnosis, it is much appreciated.

Just fyi there is no partition table, it was a raw drive. I.e the entire drive was formatted as ea single ext4 filesystem with no mbr/gpt

Then DMDE would have shown us an ext4 boot sector / superblock at sector 0.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

not sure DMDE checks for an ext superblock at sector 2 (not 0), which is where an SB is located from volume start.
but it might have had found it if it has scanning capability, which i dont know.

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

After pulling the data from the drive, I thought today I'd pull a smart report, print it and attach to the disk for reference. When I did this, the drive is not detected. I get the message DID_BAD_TARGET .

Glad I got the data off when I did as the drive must be failing in some way as it does not behave normally, consistently.

Okay, so a reboot resolved the DID BAD TARGET.

It must have crashed the driver ?

Still does not seem great.

I think this may be your problem:

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A backup a day keeps DR away.