80GB Samsung SP0822N - F/W WA100-34 - Two phys. heads

Drive has a clicking noise but is recognized (mostly) by device manager in windows XP. I have tried "ZAR" recovery software but it does not work because the drive is lost from the XP device manager when starting clicing after a few GB of recovery.

I have tried diagnosis using HUTIL. When running a "short test" it fails the "Head Test" (Service Code => AJ22: Not Ready). Disabling Head 1 makes the head test Pass, but the "PES" test fail. (AJ22 error)
I suspect head 1 is damaged.

1) Is it possible to recover (<50%) using software working directly on the IDE bus?

2) Before I change the heads, is there some way I can disable head 1 and then recover what ever can be read by head 0?

The drive has been opened by a recovery shop and diagnosed as 98% recoverable.

send it back to the recovery shop. you wont be able to do a thing without expensive equipment.

agree.

You can make only more worse the case...
The H1 is dead, clearly.
You need special environment and expensive tools to replace it, and make the drive use safely the new head set.

If you lets in some dust, you need to say bye bye to data.
If the H1 crashes when you toying with the drive (most likely will) it will scratch up the surface in few seconds, and bye bye data again....

Janos

If you data is worth anything, just pay the recovery shop.

They have clearly done their diagnosis work (presumably for free), or are you expecting everything for free?

If the data is worthless, just throw the drive away.

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It's P80VA. I'll do another check to leave no doubts, but it's beyond end user. I assume the diagnose is correct. Pay the recovery.