Tag Archives: Misc

HTS5450 Second Generation

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Now in it’s new 7mm slimline form factor, and Advanced Format specification. This hard drive is proving a popular choice for Vendors with limited space within their new hardware such as Ultra thin laptops and slim portable external cases. Now being manufactured by Western Digital under the  brand name of HGST, the 500GB boasts just a single media platter to store all that data. I would like to make customers aware of the new Advanced Format specification of these drives. Certain Operating systems such as Windows XP require the use of the HGST Align Tool provided by Western Digital. Customers with the latest Macintosh Operating system and Windows 7, do not require the use of this Tool.

Advanced Format has been introduced to cram more data on a single platter. To do this the manufacturer has increased the standard 512 byte sector size to a whopping 4096 byte sector. This format design also incorporates better data integrity, hopefully giving the customer all round better performance.

Customers need to remember at the end of the day, electronic devices can malfunction at any time. So make sure you always backup your precious data.

Novatech Data Recovery Nationwide

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Following the success of our local data recovery partnership with Novatech, we now have expanded our partnership services to cover Novatech’s other stores nationally. You will find our leaflets at the service department counter in your local store.

Old Quantum Pro Drive 250 MB 50 Pin SCSI

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Old Quantum Pro Drive 250mb 50pin SCSI

This hard drive was opened in our clean room for internal rework. In the process we found that the rubber crash stops attached to the VCM magnet were perished.  They were oozing sticky rubber solution contaminating the drive internally. A word of warning to anyone who may still have one of these hard drives with critical data. I would recommend back up and replacement. This particular hard drive was out of a synthesiser that had stopped working.

Cheap USB Pen Data Recovery

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Our low cost USB Pen & Camera Flash Media Recovery Services can recover data from physically broken, formatted and deleted USB Pens & Camera cards. 

We have just received an 8GB USB pen with a broken connector. The customer started phoning around and was shocked by the costs he was given. He then called us and was pleased to hear that we only charged £90.00 if the rework was successful. This rework includes dismantling and repair of the USB Pen even when to the customer it looks as if all is lost.

The recovery was 100% successful.

Maxtor N40P Hard Drives Still Around

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These old Maxtor single platter non SATA slimline 40GB hard drives are prone to manufacture data area start up problems. For the customer they sound like a mechanical problem as the internal heads cannot settle and make a clicking noise. They also do not show up correctly in a computer bios.

We have just received one in for data recovery with the same fail symptom. With our past experience we have been able to overcome the problem without having to open up the drive .

Hitachi Model HTS5450 Notebook Hard Drives

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We have been receiving these particular Hitachi model hard drives for data recovery since 2010. The majority of them all appear to show the same failing symptom to the customer. Resulting in access to the user data area of the hard drive becoming more and more difficult.

After several reworked hard drives we have determined that the problem appears to be the written data on the disc media. This may initially have been caused by the internal read and write heads writing bad data or the disc media itself suffering some mis-alignment.

Whatever the cause, the rework to overcome this is usually a slow and very deliberate process. To any customers with these particular hard drives, make sure you back up regularly and any signs of slow or difficult access, you may want to think about replacing the drive.

 

Seagate Full Disk Encryption FDE

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These Seagate FDE hard drives encrypt the data automatically as it is read and written to the drive. As you save data to the drive it is encrypted immediately and can only be accessed when you input your user name and password. The drive will then be temporarily unlocked and allow the operating system to boot. Once the drive is powered off, it will be automatically locked again.

We have received several of these drives from customers who cannot access their data due to a hard drive failure. You may still b asked for the password, but the laptop will then fail to boot. This can be as a result of bad sectors or electronic problems. We can overcome virtually any type of failure and can return your data back to you decrypted and fully accessible on a new hard drive.

USB Powered Portable Hard Drives Failing To Spin

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We see a lot of portable hard drives that don’t spin up when plugged into a USB port. All brands of hard drive can be effected including Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate. The problem can be caused by power loss or sometimes due to mis-plugging of the USB lead. This causes the internal read heads to sit on the disc instead of parking on the ramp at the side.

The only way to overcome this problem is by taking the hard drive into our clean room to replace the damaged heads with good ones. This allows us to copy the data from the drive and store it on our server.

The repaired hard drives are not suitable to be reused after this sort of work as they will not work correctly.