Data Recovery Blog
A selection of our articles, written by us and not Ai generated. These are generally details of some of the recoveries we’ve completed, or other associated info.
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Data Recovery From Warranty Hard Drives
You often see data recovery companies claiming that they are approved data recovery partners to specific hard drive manufacturers. In all honesty most hard drive manufacturers will retain the warranty on hard drives that have been worked on by a reputable data recovery company, as long as a written report with a company letterhead is supplied on completion of the work. Seagate on the other hand use their own Partner Recovery Process with registered data recovery companies to retain the warranty on the hard drive. These companies are usually more costly than the competition and it does not allow you the freedom of…
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Seagate SSHD ST500LM000 Recovery
Click Here To See An Update About This Post This hard drive is one of the new Hybrid drives that also uses flash memory for quicker access. It recognises frequently accessed data and stores this in the flash memory for faster read performance. We have received these hard drives for recovery before and have had good success with rework ranging from firmware fixes to internal repair. We received one of these hard drives just recently which had very limited access. It would show all of the hard drives details including Make, Model, Serial Number and Firmware, but it would not allow…
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OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2: Data Recovery
This OWC external enclosure is a common sight on the desks of Mac users with big storage needs. It’s a pretty standard 4-bay box, styled somewhat like a cousin of a PowerMac G5 or 1st generation Mac Pro. Inside are the usual options of RAID 0 to RAID 5 with a few additions like JBOD & RAID 10 thrown in for good measure. There are a few variations of this device but the back panels commonly have USB, Firewire, and eSATA ports for direct connection to a PC or Mac. There is no ethernet port on these drives which makes…
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Data Recovery from Fire Damaged Hard Drives
Following a fire at a science lab, five hard drives had sustained damage. Although hard drives often survive a fire, they can sometimes be damaged more by the water used to bring the blaze under control. Fortunately for the lab involved, somebody had managed to extract the hard disks from the scene and quickly bag them. It is critical to work fast with fire and water damage, before corrosion takes hold. The lab have been using our data recovery services since 2005 so the technical department knew exactly where to send the disks. Cleaning and Decontamination To maximise the chances…
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Hitachi Apple Badged Drive Label With Incorrect Model Number
Just recently we received a failed HTS543232L9SA0 from a Macbook Pro. When we carried out the initial diagnosis we noticed that the drive capacity was 160GB and not 320GB as the model number suggests. The Model number should have read HTS543216L9SA0. This particular hard drive has a black label which is different than most Hitachi drive labels of the same type. When we opened the drive in our clean room we found that the drive only had two heads compared to a 320GB which has four. When the drive is attached to our hardware or a PC it identifies correctly as a…
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The Importance of Second Opinions
We recently received a call from a customer asking if there was any chance of recovering data from an old IBM IDE laptop hard drive that he had stored away. He mentioned that many years ago he had sent it to a data recovery company, who had no success in overcoming the problem, so he had it returned back to him, hoping that in the future technology may change. As we offer a free diagnosis, I told him that we can determine if there is any chance of recovery at no initial cost. So with nothing to lose the customer sent…
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We Recovered a Western Digital Hard Drive That Others Couldn’t
Case Study Drive: WD3200AAJS-40RYA0 Problem: Clicking. Diagnosed by multiple third parties as unrecoverable. This hard drive has travelled the globe and had been looked at by various data recovery companies, eventually landing on the desk of our data recovery partner in Amsterdam. Our partner then asked us if we were up for a challenge and explained to us that the last data recovery company to look at the drive in Portugal had given up with no success. Third Party Feedback We got in contact with the company in Portugal and they explained to us that they had tried mechanical and firmware repair, but…
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Battle Cards
For a limited time only we have produced collectible battle cards, complete with hard drive portraits and battle stats. There are 10 to collect. Some are based on common hard drives, but others are a bit more obscure. We’ve also got plans for a few new ranges, so get these new cards while you can. These cards are not for sale so contact us if you want some.
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iOS vs Android Secure Erasure
I’ve previously written about the difficulties recovering data from modern iOS devices. This new post by Avast(!?) shows it from another angle. What happens when you sell an old device? TL;DR Because iOS uses hardware encryption on the main storage, recovery is almost impossible without the passcode. In contrast, Android phones (usually, by default) don’t encrypt the main storage. Also they allow external SD cards which may not be encrypted either. This means if an iPhone and an Android phone are sold or lost without being carefully erased, the iPhone will not easily give up the data but an android phone…
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How To Ruin Your Chances Of Data Recovery
Maybe the title is a bit harsh, but in the past week I have seen an unusually high number of hard drives ruined by avoidable problems. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing the data would have been recoverable if the hard drive hadn’t been tampered with first. Manufacturing Hard drives are manufactured in a controlled environment. Staff wearing white overalls, gloves, and masks, control machines which are carefully organised to prevent contamination getting inside the hard drive. Clean Room To prevent contamination when repairing the inside of a hard drive, it is necessary to use a cleanroom. This is a specially…