I have three Travelstars, HTS42 series 80 gig, HTS 54 series 80 gig, IC25 series 60 gig.

All three show one flaky head in MHDD.

My goal is to recover the drives, not the data.

I suspect all three have a bad preamp connection inside, and I was wondering...

Is it possible to remove the head assemblies in a HEPA filtered clean glove box, then clamp the preamp chip onto its plastic "circuit board" with a small C-clamp and heat it with a heat gun to try to re-establish a good electrical connection?

Or possibly to clamp and heat it without removing the heads, in-place?

Anyone ever try this?

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By flaky head I mean slow sectors mixed with uncorrectable sectors. Alternating regions of perfect sectors from the good head, then slow and bad regions from the flaky head.

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If the good sectors and bad sector remain consistent then the problem is most likely the media.

We get loads of these in for recovery and usually (but not always) Head/Surface 0 proves to be problematic indicating a design issue..

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If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/

Its right scratchy over hitachi there are some series with problems at surface, the best here should be a "hardware control", and tried to get sectors from the "most possible" surfaces.

I don't know... all three drives read sectors OK for the most part. The write head or preamp seems to be malfunctioning. This is a Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00.

Here is where I used MHDD's ERASE on a few million sectors and then scanned those sectors:



This section of the disk is where I haven't used ERASE:

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Sorry, couldn't figure out at first how to upload images.


Here is where I used MHDD's ERASE on a few million sectors and then scanned those sectors:

This section of the disk is where I haven't used ERASE:

If I ERASE the second clean section, it will look just like the first one when scanned.

If the write head can become damaged independently of the read head, then only a head swap could fix it, but if it is a repairable problem in the write preamp circuit somewhere, then these three Ptaak hard drives could have their honor restored and be reformed into warriors again.

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This is interesting, but perhaps not for the reason that you intended.

We encounter a fair number of Hitachi J9SA00 series drives, mostly in laptops. The prevailing pattern for these seems to be one bad head, along with a lot of bad sectors under the failed head. A failing write head would explain the data corruption.

In the subject drives, the corruption often begins around 400K sectors into the drive, which is where the directory resides for the operating system. Changing heads in this scenario doesn't seem to help, in that the underlying sectors are still corrupt.

There are other cases where the READ head fails, where changing heads definitely helps.

We have had some cases where a bad read head will spontaneously "heal" during imaging, and most all of the bad sectors will come out as good. I suspect that either the head is dirty, or else the process of thermal recalibration allows it to find the "sweet spot" once again.

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It's highly unlikely that your drives are experiencing any problems with the preamp. If the bad sectors are logical then you can repair them with MHDD. read the FAQ. If they bad sectors are of a physical nature then you either have a weak head that is becoming faulty or as the colleagues suggested some media damage. If you can't repair the bad sectors(logically) then you should consider tossing the drive in the bin. Even if you would attempt to swap any parts or other measures to vitalize the drive you would never get the drive stabilized to function properly again. Hard drives are complex mechanisms and they are not designed to take apart and repair. Therefore any attempts to repair physical failures on a hard drive are to temporarily stabilize the drive to salvage data from it.

This drive gest some hit before, and the particles are in the head.
You will never repair this drive, you should clean the heads, and replace the platter for drive repair.....
This is not worth it.
Much better is to sell the drives to one of the recovery companies, like me.
I am actually searching for 4 head G9 family drive....

Janos

But did you try to low level format after the head change, or did you simply recover the data and discard the drive without trying to save the drive? Many times a low level format will restore a severely corrupted WD or Seagate after the corrosion problem on the circuit board is fixed, assuming some fool hasn't relocated a lot of sectors and fouled the SMART system.

As far as a dirty head, what would be the cure, alcohol on a Q-tip? I just want to use these for external USB drives and for a couple ancient beater laptops to run aeroponic spraying programs, nothing critical to where a failure can't be rapidly detected and replaced.

I found that I actually have six of these drives that show this syndrome, two 40gs and a 30g. Twenty or thirty bucks is twenty or thirty bucks in these hard times, and I will save it if I can. Nobody best get uppity about economics or I will surely fix some of these and post the repair video on YouTube...so there (it is best to hit first, and then bargain)

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If we got the data, why would we really try to fix the drive any further? Refurbishing a drive like this is bad news.

Maybe we can work a trade for 2 or 3 smaller laptop PATA drives, perhaps for a 20, a 40, and an 80. I can be flexible here.

I have about 2 dozen screwy laptop drives, about 9/24 are Hitachi, 9/24 are Fujitsu, and the rest mixed, Mostly 30s and 40s, a Hitachi 60 a few 80s, a 100 Fujitsu, a 80 and 120 and 160 WD. I suspect the boards are mostly good, and the HDAs are probably all bad, I can remove the circuit boards. All except 1 or 2 SATA are all PATA drives. Where you at? PM me and I can send you a detailed list.

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As you can see (profile) i am in Hungary, Europe.
If you want to send me email, send to there:

janos dot haar at netcenter dot hu

Thanks,
Janos

here, locally usually i do this kind of business often.
It is easy, i get the pack/box of drives, do some quick diagnose about 1-2 days and then give the offer for the owner.
Almost all the time we can handshake.

Remotely is a little bit more harder.
In the first look, i can offer for you 2x 160Gb PATA 2,5' 5400 Samsung HM160HC.
What do you think?
Or would you like one bigger (320Gb) instead?

Anyway, first you need to send the drives to me, and after 1-2 days, i will send you back the 2 brand new.
Can we talk by skype/msn? (PM me if yes)

Janos

I don't know. The subject drives belong to clients; we return them "as is" if we can, and don't experiment with them. Maybe we can find some others to test and play with, but for what practical reason? I can't see how it would help data recovery, and we don't have faith in the longevity of a drive that has been opened and repaired -- certainly couldn't use or sell them in good faith.

Jono

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Partial disagree. I do refurbishing AS IT SHOULD BE DONE and the repaired drives work flawlessly. Of course it is not done with MHDD nor on drives that have been opened !

H1 seems bad you can try disabling heads but for that you would require special tools like Pc3000.