Re[Bug-ddrescue] format then recover? Flash firmware?

[Pieter L]

Hi Guys,

I'm having trouble with my 1TB hfs+ formatted mybook studio external drive. 
Its about a year old, however its had a good bit of use and been carried
around alot.  It's fallen over twice about a month ago but never been
dropped.  I left it plugged in whilst I used windows, then I noticed it was
making a clicking sound.. The drive spins up fine and can be seen in disk
utility, however the drive does not mount.  

After finding out about this wonderful tool I tried version 1.10 on a few
10MB chunks at various locations on the drive (50, 250, 500, 750 GB).  These
all read the entire segment as an error.  Ddrescue then proceeded to
splitting areas.  After a very long time ddrescue exited with no data
recovered.  I understand this is because the disk is completely illegible
and the failed read commands take approximately a second to execute from
this thread:

http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg00369.html

I also executed ddrescue over the entire disk, this also read the disk as
one big error.  I also found that there were certain parts of the disk where
the drive would start clicking, sometimes this did not stop until I
unplugged the data cable from the computer, other times not until I
disconnected the power.

An attempted clone with data rescue 3 did start reading some of the data off
the disk, it just took very long (which I understand is typical).  However
when I tried a deep scan, it froze on block 0.

My question is, as my drive suddenly stopped working when I plugged it into
windows, and since the clicking sometimes does not stop until I disconnect
the power, could my problem be solved by flashing the drive's firmware? Or
alternatively, could I try re-formatting the drive then reading?  A hfs
format takes only seconds so I can't imagine that it's changing much on the
drive... However I have read that the process of formatting also identifies
and leaves out bad sectors from the partition.  But does it reconfigure the
drive parameters that exist at the start of the disk, like the read/write
arm parameters?  Also would it make reading the drive a lot quicker?  Would
it even be able to format the drive?

I'm a bit puzzled by the behaviour of the drive, I get the idea that most of
the time bad sectors appear in limited amounts, i.e. the whole drive won't
just suddenly be completely filled with bad sectors like mine..  Unless the
read/write head is broken, is that a possibility?

I understand that my drive is most probably completely stuffed, however any
suggestions would be appreciated!  I'd like to get about 20GB of photos off
the end of the drive, however its a loss I'm willing to bear.  I'm quite
enjoying playing round with it actually :P
-- 
View this message in context: 
http://old.nabble.com/Reformat-then-recover--Flash-firmware--tp26449736p26449736.html
Sent from the Gnu - ddrescue mailing list archive at Nabble.com.