Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

The drive definitely seems to really start degrading after its run with hddsuperclone. I had to stop the RapidSpar trial for an actual data recovery project, and since restarted it set to Dig Bads from the start. Even at 16%, it is still fighting read errors with over 20,000 already, where the other two tests shot off and started to fly at around 10%.

Perhaps I need to stop and run the slow responding fix to see if it helps stabilize this drive. In looking at my original ticket notes, I had to do that with it when this drive first arrived for recovery.

It sounds like one of those 2 heads is going south. In any case the degrading ruins any chance of good comparison testing. If you get to a point where you decide to pull it from the testing, I would like to see another test with HDDSuperClone, only not a full test. It only needs to be for phases 1 and 2. You would add the following command line options to do this:

-- no-phase3 --no-phase4 --no-trim --no-divide --no-scrape

The purpose of this test would be to demonstrate the self learning head skipping algorithm. It should get all the data from the good heads and areas in a fairly quick amount of time, leaving any weak head/areas for later phases. This could be visibly seen using HDDSCViewer, just post the log from hddsuperclone. That is of course if you have the time and available resources...

Edit:
If the drive is again suffering from the slow issue, then there will be runaway skipping resulting in skip resets. The skip reset count should always be 0, if not it is in indication of either wrong settings or some sort of slow issue (or multiple bad heads).

Yup...the drive degraded to the point of not being very useful. So, I stopped the RapidSpar test and will run another test once I find another good candidate to push all the tools to their limits. The big question will be, "did the drive just degrade or was it pushed to its death with the software recovery tools?" Perhaps, I'll switch up the order of tools being used each time I find a different candidate to test.

Might I also suggest not attempting the retries? You did 3 retries on the bad sectors with both ddrescue and hddsuperclone, which hammered on the bad spots on the drive.

Also, I am not sure how easy it would be for you, but would you consider keeping track of ongoing progress as each tool performs the recovery? Simple stats like the time spent vs data recovered, every hour or whatever time period would be possible. Since there is always the possibility of a drive degrading or dying, it would be nice to see a comparison of how fast the tools progress in getting the data.