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 Reviews
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Toshiba Desktop Hard Drives
Western Digital want to buy Hitachi Global Storage. The FTC will only allow this if WD sell of some manufacturing capabilities to Toshiba. This seems to be due to some anti-competition type laws. The strange thing is that Toshiba don’t currently make 3.5″ drives, so perhaps we will see some strange Toshiba branded WD drives? Who knows. Maybe it will be like when Maxtor were bought by Seagate and brought out the STMXXXXXXXXX drives, which were simply Maxtor branded Seagate drives. Complicated stuff. Read the overview at Slashdot which has links to the FTC etc.
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Warning to customers with new WD hard drives
Newer WD External drives come with password protection and 256-Bit encryption as standard. Even if a password is not set the encryption is still applied to the data written to the drive. The 256-Bit encryption is controlled by ROM on the USB controller. On portable USB powered hard drives the encrypted ROM is on the actual hard drive. On external desktop drives the ROM is on the interface controller within the external case. Make sure you keep hold of the external case the hard drive was in. Although not always needed, it could be important later on. If you’ve lost…
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What is Hard Drive Encrytion
Encryption is a process to protect data by using sophisticated mathematical functions. Data is scrambled when written to the drive. This data is then not readable by an unauthorised person. When data is read back from the drive by an authorised person it is then converted back into readable data. Usually authorisation is provided by a password of some sort. When using encryption, there are few things to watch out for If you forget your password, you will be locked out of your own data. Be careful. If your hard drive starts failing you could lose access to all your data.…
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Apple Mac Time Machine Back Up
I have lost count on the amount of times we have received hard drives for data recovery from Mac customers, who are not aware of the Time Machine back software. Time Machine has been preinstalled in every version of OS X since 10.5. This software is easy to setup, and once the first backup of the internal hard drive is complete, it will then carry on backing up as you create new data. As a small business or personal user it is ideal for your everyday backup needs.
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ST9320421ASG Head Crash
This hard drive was from a Macbook Pro. As you can see in the image, loss of data was caused by a severe head crash. The damage is so severe you can actually see through the top foil layer to the glass platter beneath. Another good reason why Mac users should make sure they backup regularly.
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RAID 5 HP Smart Array E200i Recovered
We have just competed a successful recovery from an HP Smart Array E200i RAID array. Not a standard case this. It had x3 DG146BB976 2.5″ SaS drives, two of which had been overwritten with a new RAID 1 mirror. We found the disk order which was not the same as the labelled numbers. This is often the case. Also, due to the rebuild that had occurred we had to drop one of the disks and virtually rebuild it using the parity information from the other disks.
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Finding Mac Version The Easy Way
If you want to find out which version of Mac OS X is installed on a drive, but cannot boot into it, there is a plist file that holds the version number. The file can be found at: Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices > SystemVersion.plist The SystemVersion.plist file should look a bit like the picture below. I have outlined the relevant part in red: Update. Alternatively you could paste the following command into terminal: defaults read defaults read /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist | grep “ProductVersion” This will show you…
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What’s The Best / Most Reliable Hard Drive?
We get asked this question a lot. The simple answer is that there is no such thing as a reliable hard drive. This is nothing against the hard drive manufacturers, but all drives will fail eventually. Hard drives are delicate machines and must be treated with care. They are not designed to be the one and only storage for all your work, photos and videos. Imagine your computer never booting up again, and then imagine it happening during the most important job you have ever done. That’s how bad it could be, and often is for a lot of people.…
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Dual boot Ubuntu & Windows
We needed a dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 setup today, which had a few stumbling blocks. Problem 1. – GPT Partition Installed Windows 7 on half a 500GB drive and left 250GB free for Ubuntu. When booting to install Linux, it didn’t see Windows 7 due to the GPT partition that Windows 7 uses by default. Solution 1. Used Gparted from the Linux live cd to format the drive with an MBR partition layout. (Note:- This destroyed the original Windows installation.) Then installed Windows back to the drive. This time, Ubuntu saw Windows 7 during installation and was happy…