Need (simple) help with WinMFS

[The Great Inert]

Unitron, happy to see you on!

I indeed went from a 40GB to a 500GB to a 1TB. I still have the 40 and the 500, which both still work.

About a hundred million years ago (okay, 20 years ago,) Dick Wolf produced a series called "New York Undercover" that was shot almost entirely in the Lower East Side, where I was born and raised. The show itself wasn't the greatest (some of the plots laid it on a bit thick and there was a subtle but nasty streak of reverse-racism to most of the show) but it serves, for me at least, as a reminder of what my neighborhood used to be like before gentrification, NYU, and Mike "Mayor Dips**t" Bloomberg turned it into a 24 hour dorm room. Alas, it's probably lost... unless I have better fortunes this weekend...

[bshrock]

Originally Posted by The Great Inert

One thing that sucks about this situation is that I'm actually adept with hardware and could EASILY (really, really EASILY) replace the PCB on the drive...IF the PCB for my drive didn't cost $150 dollars. I swear to God, hard drive manufacturers have their consumers by the round, dangling objects. I know there's nothing mechanically wrong with the drive besides its age. If i could replace the board it would work again, even if I only ran it for the few hours it would take to clone the drive via WinMFS--but WD "won't replace parts." After all, why replace parts when you can just force people to buy new drives, right? Locking the market in this way lets third-party distributors charge a premium for replacement PCBs. Of course, in three years' time, the PCB for my drive will probably cost about 40 bucks...but then that means waiting three years to clone the drive. Which sucks. Period.

Not that I am suggesting anything... Can you get an advance replacement for the drive? Western Digital used to put a hold on your credit card and send out the replacement drive so you could copy off your data.

[bshrock]

Originally Posted by HomeUser

Note the sector values
You could abort the process as untron suggested then copy the sectors in reverse order starting at the end
some math will be required to compute the offset if the drives are not exactly the same.

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue...ue_manual.html

What math? Just start at the end address of the source drive.

[The Great Inert]

Welcome to the discussion, bshock. According to the ever-helpful people at WD, the company "doesn't replace parts". Even if I could get them to ship a replacement, the PCB of the replacement drive would have to be a 98-99% match to the PCB of the damaged drive before any data extraction could occur. As the dying drive is now 3 years old, the chance of that happening is rather slim...

[bshrock]

Probably even if the PCB was a 100% match the error map would be different.

You might try breaking the copy in small chunks letting the drive cool in-between.

copy blocks 00 through 1000 let the drive cool then copy blocks 1000 through 2000 etc.

Note: 1000 is probably way to small a value just easier for the example adjust it to just below area where the first errors are returned.

I have used the program DFSEE to binary copy a drive in just that way.

[unitron]

Originally Posted by bshrock

Probably even if the PCB was a 100% match the error map would be different.

You might try breaking the copy in small chunks letting the drive cool in-between.

copy blocks 00 through 1000 let the drive cool then copy blocks 1000 through 2000 etc.

Note: 1000 is probably way to small a value just easier for the example adjust it to just below area where the first errors are returned.

I have used the program DFSEE to binary copy a drive in just that way.

dd_rescue


can do that, you just have to give it the right parameters.

For that matter

dd

can do it as well, if you set up the options correctly.

[bshrock]

Originally Posted by unitron

dd_rescue


can do that, you just have to give it the right parameters.

For that matter

dd

can do it as well, if you set up the options correctly.

True just not the only method. I have not used dd_rescue enough to be comfortable with the options. DFSee can be run from a command prompt or by using a menu. It was what I used to recover the failed 250 Gig in my old Series2.