I am currently working on recovering a drive with bad sectors, a WD5000AAJD drive, 2 of them. These drives are part of a raid 0 setup. I attempted to re-assemble the raid, and noticed the machine kept freezing every time I tried. I tested both drives and found out that one of them has severe sector issues.

My plan was to image the drive rather than scanning it. The first image of the good drive was a success,
however, the second drive with the bad sectors isn't progressing very well. The drive has been scanning since last week Wednesday. I came back Monday, and only 16% of the drive was imaged. the image seemed to struggle after that. The image process was stopped, the drive was disconnected, waited for the drive to cool down, then the image was restarted. Today is Wednesday, and the image only scanned 6% of the drive. Apparently, imaging the drive is not the only solution for a drive with bad sectors. I don't have many ideas as to what to do next. Any suggestions?

I sounds like you might have a bad head or media damage. There is no magic trick for that, outside of replacing the head stack, which is difficult with these drives.

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So your saying a drive with bad sectors could also include a bad head, maybe not bad that the drive would not initialize, but make it very difficult to read past the bad areas because the head has a weak infrared lens?

Ir lens... Are you joking or whatelse?

Skynet, have you been smokin dope again?

I spelled it wrong. The led on the head stack that reads across the platters. Is it possible it could be week. And no, this is no joke. This is for real.

Not as much as you've been sniffing. If you have nothing beneficial to say, do not comment.

What are you using to image the drive?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

A camera

Don't forget to charge the battery fully before attempting lengthy imaging. Some cameras can recharge off of USB also which is very convenient.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Why not a NMR scan? It will give more details about servo tracks...

You guys make my day beautiful

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My Forum

What does NMR stand for?

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance... Also useful for hernia, muscle problems, etc... LOL

What imaging app / hardware are you using?

You might want to try Deepspar / Ninja / Sonix.

Possibly try a reverse clone; that, combined with the 16% you already have cloned, may suffice.

Otherwise - you need to use a pro.


Duncan
(With this recession I foresee a lot of "pros" emerging; people who have been made redundant / retrenched and feeling that a few years' experience of building and maintaining PCs is a licence to become a DR specialist.... Could be an interesting start to 2009. Happy new year, everyone!)

Yes, they come out like mushrooms in autumn. Don't worry, they work for us. Many of them will probably get sued sooner or later, other will be kicked in the ass by customers, other will be cut out by the development of new technologies and the need of tools they can't afford or use. And real pros, on long term, always win. Just wait and see.

Previous comments aside lets give skynet a break....

If I were you trying to get as near a perfect image as possible without any pro resources I would try either ddrescue or rstudio. The latter you have to pay for but it is not expensive. In Rstudio you can skip the bad sectors either manually if there are not too many or you can set the retry option to '0'.
You must remember that every second or minute you are attemting to make the image the drive is becoming even more difficult to read. If the data is of any real value you must go to a pro.

Thanks guys, you were great help.

I am going to be straightforward.


Someone that does not even understand how data is written/read from the platter should not go past the point that skynet is at.


don't buy a tool to fix something if you don't understand what the tool is actually doing to fix it.

Jesus! It took you 6 months to complete the image?