Still not very reliable.

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lcoughey
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Still not very reliable.

Post by lcoughey »

We just had a case with a Western Digital WD10EZEX-08M2NA0, a drive with bad sectors. Thinking that this would be a great case to throw on our MRT system, I found that I was mistaken.

The drive detected, we were able to save the firmware resources and create a task to image in DE. We did a headmap (head 0 & 1) and confirmed that both heads would read, but it struggled on some sectors. It was taking way too long to mark active sectors so that we could image by bitmap, so we stopped and just went for a straight clone, setting to jump to next head on errors.

The clone failed to complete after only getting about 20% of the drive imaged after a few hours. When we tried to continue imaging, the drive was not even coming up with an ID in the utility.

Thinking it was a possible firmware issue, moved over to a more trusted PC3000 Express system where the drive quickly IDs on its own, with absolutely no issue saving the firmware. So, we created a task in DE on PC3000 and were able to get the data recovered within a couple hours.

My guess is that MRT just went stupid and likely would have worked again, had I rebooted my computer. But, when dealing with customer's data, we don't have time to screw around.

I was hopeful, but will stick to only using MRT as a spare imager for imaging drives that should be relatively healthy...even though this drive, techincally, should have been a piece of cake.
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