Seagate Drive Head Returning the same data for every read?

[datahaze]

I've got an interesting Seagate drive (ST2000LM007-1R81754 Mobile HDD 2TB) in the shop right now, wondering if anybody else has seen the behaviour. The drive has 4 heads, 3 of which are working flawlessly, but head 3 is intermittently either giving loss of readiness or returning the same sector data over and over again. When reading with the PC-3000 data extractor, the tool seems to have no idea and happily accepts this duplicate data for every sector. So I end up with several GB of "imaged" data but that data is 1/4th nonsense.

Has anybody seen this before? Is this a replace the heads situation or a firmware situation? I have tried reading in a number of different modes, all give similar results, except for "read with PC-3000 utility" which just gives me all blank sectors.

 

[gameboybin]

I have ST1000LM035 with just the same issue.
Head 0 read perfectly. The head 1 reads slow like 1-3kb/s and the data given are all the same in DE

And the problem might be dead heads

 

[j.skinner]

This thread over on Recovery Force Forums should help...

Forum

Jared has a video on how to change the head temperatures to get a better read when presented with these moldy sectors, however I have not tried it myself.

Youtube

 

[gameboybin]

This thread over on Recovery Force Forums should help...

Forum

Jared has a video on how to change the head temperatures to get a better read when presented with these moldy sectors, however I have not tried it myself.

Youtube

Yeah. I did read through his post. Need to send him the Stats/ Haven't tried this thing myself. Need a lot of Calculation as in Jared's post

 

[pclab]

Or swap heads then...