very weak H0

[abedalkareem]

hello ,
got this drive it was opened before got it , imaged H1 , H2 successfully with some bad sectors but have 14GB left to image from H0 and it barley read (4.6 KB speed AVR) witch will take months to complete

from your experience guys what is my chances to get better if heads swapped ?? does the pattern look like media damage Or contamination ??

 

[Jared]

Looks like a combination of both to me. I think there is some media damage, which you can see manifest as the blocks of 8 bad sectors in a row forming a perfect diagonal line. The other bad sectors speckled in around that likely is just unread due to the heads being weak/contaminated. If you change the heads you'll probably get a much better read, but I'd suspect you'll still get a lot of bad sectors.

Just out of curiosity, does it read better from that head near the end of the drive? Usually, media damage doesn't span the whole drive and is most concentrated in the lower LBAs. So it can give you a good indication of the heads health to try reading higher LBA regions.