Damaged T42 Hard Drive; question on recoverability

[msilano]

A co-workers 3rd party/upgraded T42 60gb drive recently died. And by died, I mean, really died.

Loud, repeated clicks when Windows tried to boot; the drive was unbootable.

Using Knoppix and DD (and ddrescue), I was able to copy about 1/2 the drive to another device.

The problem is at the 25Mb mark on the partition. The drive goes into an error loop - you've heard it before - click......seek, seek, seek, click....seek, seek, seek, click...... for about 5 minutes. Killing the ddrescue process has no effect - this appears to be happening at the IDE driver level or the drive itself.

After about 5 minutes, the drive apparently shuts down. The device becomes lost to the OS and is not visible any more. Only a reboot brings it back to life. This happens not only in Knoppix, but using any type of recovery tool - even SpinRite (not sure if I believe in SpinRite, but was trying anything....).

Is there anything I can do to the onboard controller to change this behavior? I'd like to try and read past this point, but it appears to hang on that spot each time. In fact, anything past the 25Mb mark appears to trigger the click, seek, seek, click behavior previously described.

I know the drive is dead; just trying to help out a coworker. Thanks in advance.

-mike

[Thinkpaddict]

Not that it will necessarily help, but if I were you I would try SpinRite.
In this case I don't know if it will help because of the error loop that you mention. It might very well be that you have a hardware problem within the disk itself (not just bad data, but something physically wrong with the drive.) In that case, although recovery could be possible, it might require sending it to a third party at a prohibitive cost.

You might also want to point your friend to the HD manufacturer's website, and look for special tools for that drive. Perhaps even flash the firmware?

[msilano]

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, the drive is a toshiba, and there are no firmware updates available for this particular drive.

Spinrite unfortunately gets hung up the same way.

If I had a clean room.....



-m

[christopher_wolf]

The click, seek, click, seek is something that I have encountered on a good portion of, near end-of-life, HDDs in laptops. The last one I encountered actually had a mechanical problem that was causing it. I eventually figured it out because I could no longer get it to work, then I decided to take it apart. Sure enough, I found the locking latch for the armature had come undone and jammed it, which caused the heads to hit the platters. So that is one cause of it, but there are others....besides, it might be too much trouble to try everything you can to fix it, like a cleanroom.

[ZoneMan]

If your friends data is important I would suggest to stop messing with the drive as you are only going to damage it more. This will cause additional data loss.

Take the drive to a data recovery service and have them pull what they can off the drive.

Goodluck

Zone

[JohnY2]

My experience with Spinrite 6.0 is that it will get stuck in the same loop as dd does. I've rencently had that same experience on an HP nx9010 with a toshiba 30GB drive.

[Thinkpaddict]

In that case it should be hardware problems in the disk itself. SpinRite is good, but it can't perform miracles unfortunately. I lost a disk from a Toshiba Tecra this way.