Dataquest

Data Recovery You Can Trust

Category: Hard Drive

Posts about Hard Disk Drives, ie. most of our posts!

  • When Backups Go Bad ~ Revisited

    I was recently going through some old posts on here, and found the one with the clickbaity headline When Backups Go Bad. Despite the title, I thought it was worth looking again at some of the common ways backups can go wrong. A bad backup can be as useless as no backup at all. There is an old phrase that applies perfectly to backups. “One is None. Two is One.”

    RAID Instead of Backups

    This is a common one. Although RAID can protect against some hardware failures, it does nothing to protect against corrupt partitions, virus attacks, accidental deletion, formatting, multiple disk failures. The list is endless. Add to this the fact that you can have 12, 24, even 48TB stored in one massive array, and you stand to lose an awful lot of data in one go if the whole thing goes south.

    Same Disk, Different Day

    There are ways to partition a disk so it appears to the computer as multiple disks. The danger is, if you don’t know there are two physical disks inside the computer, you could be making backups to the same disk. When it fails, both partitions will go with it. Best backup to an external drive and then you know for sure.

    Break the Encryption

    Encrypting any data is risky without careful consideration. By design, your encrypted data is not accessible without the password, or perhaps a recovery key that was created during the original setup. If you don’t have either of those keys, you can wave goodbye to the data.

    Inbetweener

    If you’re ever left with a single copy of your files, you’re on thin ice. If something goes wrong, you’ve lost one copy of the data already. We always suggest multiple backups for this reason.

    The Space Maker

    New computers can have painfully small storage, (hey Apple) so a common solution is to start dumping files off to an external disk. This is fine if you just move over replaceable movies & music, but you have to be prepared to never see those files again. Don’t store all your photos & documents on an external drive unless you keep another copy somewhere. External disks are no more reliable than internal ones and can fail at any time. If anything, the risk of dropping or losing an external drive is higher as they are so small and portable.

    I’m sure there are more ways backups go bad. I could probably make this into a regular feature. Remember, when it comes to backups One is None, Two is One…

  • This drive has a hardware problem that can’t be repaired

    This drive has a hardware problem that can’t be repaired. Back up as much of the data as possible and replace the disk. See an authorised Apple dealer for more information.
    S.M.A.R.T. Status : Failing

    If you see the message above, your hard disk or SSD has started to fail and has reported faults to the Mac. If caught early enough, these disks can usually be recovered. You can try to copy important data to another disk but if the copy process gets stuck for a while, it’s safer to stop. If you leave a failing disk in that state it can deteriorate until the disk is ruined.

    If the data is really important, and you’d rather not take the risk, you could have a look at our Mac Data Recovery Services. We have been dealing with these sorts of problems for years and have a developed a really safe way to get the data off in good condition.

    This drive has a hardware problem that can't be repaired

    Whatever you decide to do, don’t ignore this message. The broken disk cannot repair itself, and will only get worse. In many cases, the disk won’t even be readable by the time you see this warning.

    It doesn’t matter if the disk is still inside your iMac or MacBook, we can remove it for you, and even replace the drive at the end of the recovery process if you want. Ask about our Mac Setup service if you are interested.

    Contact Us Now…

    For a fast reply from a real person.

  • Successful 8 Disk RAID Recovery

    This was a RAID recovery with a challenge. The customer could only find seven of the eight disks from the RAID and two of them were not accessible. To make the challenge even more difficult, the customer did not the RAID level or any of the configuration. All we knew was the disks were from an old Dell Server.

    The RAID Recovery

    We first managed to overcome the failed disks and imaged all disks to our server. Once complete we analysed all of the images to determine the RAID settings and configuration. We found two different RAID’s with completely separate configurations. We used the settings to create virtual copies of the RAIDs and were able to carry out a successful recovery from both RAID Volumes.

    The client was gobsmacked by the outcome. You can see his comment below:

    DataQuest are amazing, we sent 7 HDD’s in a unknown raid configuration and with a failed hard drive, they managed to recover all the information we needed and more! I believed it was an impossible task, but obviously these guys know their stuff and are miracle workers! I thank the team at DataQuest and would recommend them to anyone! – Matt Bayley – February 29, 2016

    We had a very satisfied customer as well as very satisfied RAID recovery Engineer. Well Done Dan, give yourself a pat on the back.

  • Flood and Water Damaged Hard Drives

    Flood and Water Damaged Hard Drives

    With the recent floods in the United Kingdom, it is important to know that time can be a critical factor when trying to recover data from mechanical hard drives that have been submerged or damaged by water. Most mechanical hard drives have breather holes that may allow water to enter the hard drive enclosure if submerged. If this is the case then the longer the hard drive is left in this condition the worse the internal damage. Even if the hard drive is left to dry out, internally the damage has already been done. Our advice is not to try this if the data is critical to you or your business.

    Any water damage hard drives that we receive go straight into our clean room environment to be dismantled and dried out internally. The hard drives external electronics would also require a cleaning process to prevent any electrical shorting caused by the water residue.

    Although Solid Sate Hard Drives ( SSD ) do not have any mechanical moving parts, they are still prone to damage to the data chips and electronics by residue left by the water. Very much as mechanical hard drives they would require dismantling and specialist cleaning to ensure no electrical shorting of components.

  • Hard Drive Encryption Data Recovery

    Hard Drive Encryption Data Recovery

    Encrypted hard drives come in many forms. They can be created by the hard drive manufacturer as part of the hard drives firmware or as a third party software add on such as Symantec PGP or Microsofts Bitlocker.

    Hard drive Encryption is becoming much more common especially in many large enterprise companies. Some hard drive encryption is more sophisticated than others, but in many data recovery cases we receive, a common flaw is the inability of the encryption software to overcome bad sectors on a hard drive. In most cases it results in partial or no access to the decrypted data on the hard drive by the user or even their I.T dept.

    We have created an image and decryption process that allows us to recover the users data with the original file and folder structure intact. The time it takes to carry out this process will depending on the level of hard drive encryption used.

  • Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM & ST1000DM Problems

    Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM & ST1000DM Problems
    Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM & ST1000DM Problems

    This year we have seen a fair number of these particular model hard drives with internal media damage caused by a head crash. These are 3.5″ hard drives from external cases such as Seagate Freeagent Go-Flex and Seagate Expansion Desktop. They are also used as internal hard drives in PCs running Windows 7 & 8 also used in Apple iMac’s running OSX.

    It has been difficult to confirm whether the media damage seen has been caused by an impact such as a dropped drive or from general electronic failure. What we do know is that as soon as you hear one of these hard drives start to click, then if you have not already got a backup in place, backup your data immediately.

    On an Apple Mac running OSX the first sign of a problem is usually a spinning beach ball resulting in slow access. On a PC running Windows 7 & 8, the signs of a hard drive problem are once again slow access and lack of movement from the mouse icon.

    If you have a problem with a Seagate hard drive, have a look at our Seagate Data Recovery Services. If we catch it early enough we should be able to recover the data!

     

  • Seagate ST1000LM024 Samsung HN-M101MBB

    These notebook size drives must be popular at the moment as we have started to see a fair few of them come into us. Last month we saw three of them alone with no spin failures. When opened in our clean room we have found that the internal mechanical heads have prevented the motor and discs from spinning as a result of the heads sitting on the disc media. In normal operation the heads should never touch the discs but fly above them carrying out the reading and writing. When the drive is not in use or idle the heads will locate on a parking ramp at the side of the discs. If power to the hard drive is lost while it is reading or writing then this will cause the heads to drop onto the discs and not onto the parking ramp. Once reworked in our internal clean room they were all recovered successfully.

    A common cause of this, is the unplugging of the USB cable incorrectly.

  • Windows 10 Upgrade Problems

    Windows 10 Upgrade Problems

    If you’ve had a disaster during the Windows 10 Upgrade, don’t panic. Chances are your data is fine, but whatever you do next could change that!

    If You Have a Backup

    If you made a backup of the data before the upgrade then check the backup files on another computer. If the backup is good, the safest way forward is to restore the backup onto a fresh drive. Then if you find a problem with the data later, or if the restore fails, you still have the original “broken” drive to send to us for recovery. A common mistake is to restore the backup onto the failed disk, but if that goes wrong you’re left with nothing!

    Windows 10 Upgrade Problems
    Windows 10 Upgrade Problems

    If You Don’t Have a Backup

    If you don’t have a backup you need to be really careful what you do next. If you send / bring the computer or disk to us, we can safely recover the data using the techniques we’ve developed over the last 15 years.

    Whatever you decide, give us a call first, and we can warn you against doing anything that could harm the data.

  • The Problem With Disk Imaging

    When you hear of data recovery companies using disk imaging as part of their process, this is done to create a Bit by Bit copy of the customers hard drive. This then allows work to be carried out on a copy instead of the original. It can also be used to take the data off the customers hard drive in a controlled manner, especially when the hard drive shows signs of being unstable. In those situations this process usually works well and has a very good success rate, but what if the customers hard drive is part of a criminal investigation that requires forensic evidence for court proceedings.

    This then takes the whole disk imaging process to a different level. A hard drives data storage is not as straight forward as it appears when you see it on your computer. The hard drive manufacturer allows the user access to the majority of the hard drives storage space, but there are areas of the drive that are kept free and protected (HPA) for use by the manufacturer only. It is these areas that are not normally carried over in a standard Bit by Bit imaging process used by most data recovery companies.

    Technically If someone wanted to hide specific data and had the use of specialist tools, they could hide data within these protected areas. There are also many other alterations, that can be carried out to a hard drive to hide user data, so it can be a bit of a mine field for forensic data recovery. To read a more detailed technical description then please see the following article about Forensic Imaging.

  • Data Recovery in Birkenhead

    Being born and bred in Birkenhead, I wanted to let you local Birkonian’s know of our data recovery services. Although now based in Costa del Portsmouth we cover all towns and cities in the UK. We may not be local, but with the low cost in transport and courier services, it makes using a company you can trust the sensible thing to do. I already know the lingo so hopefully already halfway there. So Cum ‘ed den try using our services, I would be chuffed if you did.