Don't know how, but one of my hard drives decided to crap the bucket yesterday and is giving me tons of read errors. what are the chances that I can pull the data off successfully using MediaTools? I don't think the actual platters are damaged, so has anyone had any success taking the circuitboard off and switching it with another "identical" drive? any suggestions? freezer?

2/20/2007 10:01:27 AM

Read errors? Get it some glasses?

2/20/2007 10:14:53 AM

what good will swapping out the circuit board be? if you're getting read errors, that's a platter issue.

2/20/2007 10:17:13 AM

cause I don't think the platters are damaged. It had about 300 read errors in the first 700 LBA, which makes me think circuit, because a head crash just doesn't seem like the problem, since the drive isn't making any weird noises or anything like that.

2/20/2007 10:25:15 AM

well, 2.5 hours later, 25% done "copying the data." WD's data lifeguard tools shit does a better job pulling the data off than MediaTools. Kinda surprising. Also, DLT doesn't say there is a problem w/ the drive. wtf, mate...

2/20/2007 10:16:53 PM

doesn't mean that some of the sectors aren't losing data periodically now...

2/21/2007 8:55:54 AM

hmmm. now there are no read errors when using MediaTools, but the drive still causes Windows to crash, even after a reformat of the drive. weird junk. Oh well, I gots my data off the drive, that's all I wanted.

2/23/2007 1:51:51 PM

sounds like a bad drive possibly circuit related, but i'd also look at your cables... it sounds like you've formatted and are still having issues making me think it's not just a random occurrence.

there is a rare chance it could be chipset driver related as well, i've had read errors there have been directly related to raid chipset drivers, i'd imagine this could happen with onboard ide/sata as well, this could also explain why tools outside of windows aren't having issues reading the drive but windows does.

[Edited on February 23, 2007 at 3:51 PM. Reason : .]

2/23/2007 3:50:54 PM

well, i initially used a different cable, thinking that might have been the problem. same results. I've been using this drive for quite a while, so I'm rather confused as to why it would be crapping out like this based on drivers. it's all weird

2/23/2007 11:22:38 PM

might not be the hard drive at all!

2/24/2007 7:49:46 AM