Hi Everyone,
I have hung around here off and on for a few years and really appreciate the forum and all the great information.

I do small time data recovery for clients that can't afford much. I have pretty good success @ keeping these beasts out of the clean room. But then again I maybe do less than a handful of these things per year.


I have a drive here, old 60GB 4.2k rpm HGST/IBM Travelstar drive that's on it's last leg and has quite a bit of bad sectors, still mechanically sounds OK and the BIOS sees it just fine.
Heck, even windows will try to boot sometimes.

I have connected it up to my cloning station running Prosoft's Media Tools Pro, I have started a reverse clone in IDE Direct access mode.

It started out sailing away, no bad sectors, then it hit them within a few minutes. So I set it to skip mode (Read Retries = 0 ) as the retries were pointless.

It's been going along for a few hours, at the default IDE Device time-out, it seems to wait about 3sec before moving on to the next sector. It's still in Bad Sector land. It's up to almost a count of 10k on bad sectors. Its at about 174k sectors processed thus far. So, if my math is right, it's found about 80MB of data. Maybe about 5MB of bad unreadable sectors.
It's estimating about 1200-1500hrs. ETC.

The drive sounds normal, it's reading the platters, and buzzing about like it should. It's just being slow and steady at it.

I have the device time-out set to 0ms, which doesn't seem to make any more bad sectors than the default of 150,000ms 2.5min. It just seems to get it through the bad sectors faster, and on-to the next, then hopefully to the good part of the drive.
The noise the drive makes doesn't seem to be any different at different time-out settings.

Anyway, nothing bad noise wise.
Hopefully that's enough info for you. I tend to be long winded.

Is there a recommended combination of delay/time-out settings in the program I should be using, is this another issue altogether?
IE. Cloning it isn't the answer?
Or should I be using a different program?
I have many, and have tried many over the years, this one seems to be the fastest and most efficient about getting in and getting it cloned while it's still breathing.

PS. It seems to have gotten to a section of good data, so it's down to about 200-300hrs or so, and about 136k bad sectors.

So it looks like all hope is not lost after all, I have just not seen a drive before with that many bad sectors in a row, so thought I'd post and see If I could gain any insight into my understanding of these things.

Thanks a bunch!! =)

It may not be bad sectors.

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Ditto. Seems more a head problem or firmware issue. The more you try, the more you damage it.

you have hung around here for a few years and you don't know how to use MHDD? this will tell you the problem.

Like another guru´s told u could be a bad head, some cases are common on Hitachi family´s at some times its possible did a head map, and get sectors from functional heads, bypassing the wrong head, but u need special equipment to this that. if no u need to did the MHA swap, if u have experience if no, will be better send to another company to did the task

Regards

It could be bad head or a scratch on a surface.
Every time you are trying to read those bad sectors, you are killing heads and chances of cheap recovery is getting lower.
Consider outsourcing some of the jobs...

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