Question: Ok, so I have a WD3200AAKS 320gb SATA SSD.
It was from a PC I had before I ever knew what a backup was, so dont lecture me there.
It has Vista on it with some pictures, which I want to backup.
When I try to boot my PC with its plugged in I get a bios screen with a spinning wheel. So I uninstalled the drive and plugged it in after the PC booted via USB.
At first I saw the partitions with proper names and was able to click into one partition and see data. It looked like I could copy a tiny bit of data to my working hdd, but the speed was literally like 400kb/s and then it froze. No data actually copied.
Now I see the partitions with improper names but cannot access them. Trying to open a partition just freeze the PC.
How to fix? Any chance?
Answer:Use HDDSuperTool or WDMarvel to apply the WD “slow fix”. Then use HDDSuperClone to clone the HDD, sector by sector.
WDMarvel is not free, but a one month licence is cheap. It also runs under Windows. The other tools are free but Linux based.
The “slow fix” patches the firmware to disable background processes, read retries and the like. This stabilises the drive so that it can be cloned. Hopefully the heads are all still in working order, although one or more may be “weak”.
One other possibility is a PCB fault. Does your PCB have a Marvell 88I6745-TFJ1 MCU? If so, then this chip is known to suffer from “head mimic” faults, ie the drive will produce symptoms similar to a head failure.