So this one I find interesting. I've got a Hitachi HTS547550A9E384 here that when it's first powered on clicks away like crazy. My first thought was to just quote for a head swap and move on to the next job. But I noticed that after about 30 clicks it finally does come ready. So I backed up the NV-RAM and SA (which worked amazingly).
So when I went to clone, I discovered that every time it got to head 2 it would go back to clicking. Disabled head 2, cloned the other three heads with only a few thousand bad sectors. Now I decide to attempt head 2 by itself (wasn't expecting much). After a bit of playing around, I've found that I can clone head 2 in reverse at about 350kb/s. It clicks for about a minute whenever I start the cloning, but then it stabilizes and reads steady.
Looks like this clicking nightmare drive will be able to image without swapping the heads at all. It'll take a full week to do it, but I just never expected that a drive with such a pronounced click could be imaged.
So when I went to clone, I discovered that every time it got to head 2 it would go back to clicking. Disabled head 2, cloned the other three heads with only a few thousand bad sectors. Now I decide to attempt head 2 by itself (wasn't expecting much). After a bit of playing around, I've found that I can clone head 2 in reverse at about 350kb/s. It clicks for about a minute whenever I start the cloning, but then it stabilizes and reads steady.
Looks like this clicking nightmare drive will be able to image without swapping the heads at all. It'll take a full week to do it, but I just never expected that a drive with such a pronounced click could be imaged.
