This hard drive was out of a customers Macbook Pro. As you can see in the image, loss of data caused by a severe head crash. Another good reason why Mac users should make sure they back up regularly.
ST9320421ASG Head Crash
This Seagate ST31000333AS 1TB drive suffered a head crash resulting in severe media damage. The contamination caused by the damage can be seen on the disc surface as well as the internal filter. The filter is usually white but is now silver metallic in colour as a result of the contamination. The customer did not have any indication that this was going to happen.
Seagate Head Crash ST31000333AS
Seagate ST31000333AS Filter
Inside a broken hard drive today we came across some of the most damaged read / write heads we have ever seen. Below is an example of how the heads should look. Notice how straight they are at the ends.
Good Seagate Heads
Then below are the damaged heads. They are at 90 degrees to the discs (tomb stoning) and would have been scraping the inner disc surfaces to pieces. Bad times!
Bad Seagate Heads
Dataquest’s specialist data recovery services incorporated in Novatech’s bespoke IT & Telecomms hardware solutions. Novatech can now offer their customers the complete worry free IT Solution. In partnership with Novatech, Dataquest will provide their customers with 24/7 Data Recovery support.
We are still seeing these drives failing even after nearly 4 years. This just shows that there is no specific time stamp when these drives are going to fail. So anyone out there who still owns a original mac book with its original drive needs to make sure a regular back up is in place.
We are a specialist data recovery company in Hampshire recovering data from corrupt, defective and faulty hard disk drives. We are based in Copnor, Portsmouth and are an independent company, not part of a franchise. All of our work is carried out at our site, and not sent on to another company.
We offer data recovery on a national service. Some of the main areas we cover in Hampshire are Portsmouth, Southampton, Hayling Island, Isle of Wight, Gosport, Fareham, Basingstoke, Havant, Waterlooville, New Forest, Andover, Emsworth, Petersfield, Romsey, Winchester, Alton and Aldershot.
Our speciality is recovering data from hard disk drives, but we can also recover data from USB Pens, Camera flash cards and CDs, DVDs.
PC or Mac, we can recover either. Windows, Linux or Mac OS.
If you would like to use our data recovery service, please use the contact link near the top right of this page.
Our address is Dataquest International Ltd, 24 Domum Road, Copnor, Portsmouth, Hampshire, PO2 0QZ, United Kingdom.
There have been some new reports of drive issues in the new MacBook Pros. It seems that the updated Seagate 7200rpm drives are getting a bit noisy at times and clicking. No reports that this causes anything particularly sinister, but after the (still ongoing) MacBook headcrash fiasco, it’s bad news to see another problem between MacBooks and their drives. There are suggestions that the new 7200.4 G-Force drives are noisy due to some new anti-shock technology. It sounds obvious that a drive spinning at 7200rpm is going to generate more noise than a 5400rpm drive. We’ll see what happens with this one. Updates to come I’m sure.
LaCie Big Disk
Over the years we have seen stacks of LaCie Big Disks (and quite a few LaCie Bigger Disks too). With their designer looks and an abundance of different interfaces, it is no surprise that they are so popular. There is however one main reason that people send us their drives, and that is because they are not working.
Those of you familiar with hard drives will be aware that these LaCie drives are substantially larger in physical size and storage capacity when compared to a standalone hard disk drive. The reason being is that the LaCie Big Disk contains two hard disks (and the LaCie Bigger Disk contains four hard drives). Of course when you attach the drive to your computer you only see one volume. This is due to a RAID controller inside the LaCie drive which allows for multiple disks to appear as one large, usable disk. The main advantage to this setup is that read and write speeds can be very fast, as the reads and writes are spread over multiple disks. Another bonus is that the capacity of the volume is as large as the two drives. So two 500GB drives will give you a 1TB volume. There is however a massive downside to all of this clever RAID business which boils down to some simple mathematics.
The larger the number of hard disk drives used in this particular striped (RAID 0) setup, the more chance that one of them will fail, therefore a higher chance that you will lose all of the data stored on these drives. The way a RAID 0 stripe works is to distribute the data across the disks at block level. The amount of blocks used for each stripe is determined by the RAID controller and varies between different manufacturers. What this means, from a data recovery point of view is that in order to extract data from a LaCie Big Disk, you need to figure out the block size, and read the data from both drives in sequence, in order to extract usable data. This sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is and is often explained with the analogy of a filing cabinet.
Imagine the LaCie Big Disk is a filing cabinet. The cabinet has two drawers (disks) with an index in the first drawer. Now imagine that when you save a file into the cabinet, all of the odd numbered pages are put into the first drawer, and all of the even numbered pages are put into the second drawer. Once saved, the files location is stored in the index. In order to read back the saved file, it must first be collected from the relevant drawers, one page from each drawer at a time, and arranged into the correct order.
This is all great until a problem occurs. What happens when one of the drawers becomes damaged and can no longer be opened. Sure you can access all of the pages in the other drawer but having every other page is not much use to anybody! So until you can access both drawers, the documents are worthless.
The hard drives in a LaCie Big Disk are much the same as any other hard drive on the market. This means they are just as likely to have the same failures as a standalone drive. They suffer from electronic problems on the PCB, firmware corruption and also internal component failure and head crashes. These are problems which need to be overcome before any attempt at a recovery is even possible.
Aside from the usual hard drive problems, we have also seen other problems such as failed power supplies or damaged circuit boards within the LaCie Big Disk, which prevent access to the stored data.
This is why we have spent a lot of time researching the process of recovering data from RAID systems such as the LaCie Big Disk. We follow the same precautions with RAID as we do with single volume drives.
As with all data recovery, the most important thing to remember is that any attempts to access the data without following strict precautions could result in the data being either lost forever, or extremely expensive to get back.
The best advice is to keep these drives backed up as regularly as possible to avoid future headaches.
1. Stop using the drive. Any mechanical faults can be worsened by using a failing hard disk drive.
Checking file system on C:The type of file system is NTFSOne of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue.To skip disk checking, press any key within 7 second(s).
Just recently we have had an influx of unrecoverable Seagate Momentus 2.5″ hard drives. These drives are used in most of the Apple portables from the Macbooks to Macbook Pros and also in laptops from other manufacturers. Ranging from 60-120GB they seem to suffer from some sort of media defect. Most of the problems we see with these drives are head crashes, where the read/write mechanism contacts the disc surface, removing some of the magnetic coating. This damage is not always visible on the top surface of the disc so can be difficult to confirm. If we do see damage then we would not usually attempt any rework, due to the almost instant contamination of the new component. After many failed recovery attempts and much money wasted on replacement mechanisms we decided that we should just inform our customers of the problem before they send us the drive as we have only had one single successful recovery from these drives. I have listed some affected model numbers below for information purposes only. Please be aware that we have no information about how widespread this problem may be. We do only see defective drives in our line of business!
Update 21-9-2010:
We are still receiving a trickle of these drives in for diagnosis. Unfortunately they are still unrecoverable. There must be loads of people still using these, without any idea of the potential failure that awaits them.