Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

Hello everyone,
i need to swap heads on a MQ04UBD200 patient drive.
I've a MQ04UBD200 donor drive, i need to know if in your opinion heads are compatible with the patient.

Donor drive is 37 months older than patient.
Donor Cyl num: 361612
Donor SPT: 3632

Patient Cyl num: 355807
Patient SPT: 3840

It should be fine, in my opinion. With Toshiba, they are usually pretty flexible with head matching. The big challange is with the fact that it is an SMR model (MQ04) where sometimes the patient won't be very accomodating to any set of donor heads.

Hi, thank you for the answer.
Patient drive stop reading in less than a second since i start cloning (getting red squares) and it goes busy.
Sw or Hw reset don't have any effect, i have to repower.
I turned off ARRE via terminal with SP command and i used option "read from active utility" enabled in DE. I was able to clone about 250.000.000 LBAs by ticking only the second option (which is PBA access, solve G-list damage), as is shown on Acelab blog.
I didn't tick the 1st option which is "CONSIDER LOGICAL SECTORS PER PHISICAL SECTOR"... should i tick also this one?
Now the drive is reading worse, also with this option enabled it stops reading after 1 second and gets very busy, but he can continue very slowly in PIO mode (of course only through utility).
Also, the customer told me that she dropped the drive on the table (only few centimeter high, while it was not powered).

In your opinion, is this behaving due to damaged heads or due to SMR?
What could i do to overcome to SMR issues on Toshiba drives?

What technique to use to prevent writings on Toshiba SMR hdd after head swap?