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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FBI Decryption Failed
It was interesting to read this article recently which shows how strong current encryption technology is. The FBI and other organisations were apparently unable guess or crack the pre-boot passwords of criminal’s hard drives using a technique known as a dictionary attack. As it’s name suggests, a dictionary attack uses a combination of known words to attempt to guess the password. This is opposed to a brute force approach which would start from one series of characters and continue in a sequence to guess possible combinations. It is worth remembering that if you are going to encrypt your hard drive…
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3TB Seagate Drive
A new 3TB drive is looming on the horizon, yet this may not be the breakthrough it seems. There appears to be major problems in the way older versions of Windows handle drives above 2.1TB. Windows XP and below will be unable to make use of these drives in any meaningful way, with some reports suggesting that only 990MB of usable capacity would be available to these vintage operating systems. It sounds like one more nail in XP’s coffin. If you need this mountain of storage it seems like it’s time to ditch XP already! Read more on Slashdot
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LaCie 5Big RAID 6 Recovery
I will start by saying that we can, and have, recovered data from these drives. As with all RAID recovery we carry out, we never use the original controller or drives to access the data. We image the drives on an individual basis and then work on these drives to rebuild the RAID using a form of RAID emulation. The most time consuming part of this type of recovery is discovering the RAID settings that the manufacturer has used. Due to the complex nature of these NAS devices, we always recommend they are backed up to another form of media.…
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Seagate 7200 Snapped Spindle
We have received two of these failed drives recently in succession. Further clean room examination has confirmed that the spindle stack has detached itself from the motor base and coil. When first handling the drive it becomes quite obvious that this has happened as you can actually feel the pack rattling. Surprisingly we cannot see any physical damage on the media or contamination and fortunately the clamp has kept the pack secure. We would not recommend spinning the drive up in this condition. The only rework available is to transfer the pack into a good Seagate donor as part of…
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Western Digital NAS Problems
We have recently started to see a peak in the number of 500GB WD drives sent to us from Western Digital MyBook World edition NAS Servers. These NAS devices use two WD5000AAKS drives in a RAID configuration. The worrying thing for users is that even drives used in RAID 1 mirror mode are having problems, where either both drives are failing at the same time or where one drive has failed in the past and the other following suit some time later. It is an important reminder that RAID does not equal backup. If there is important data on these…
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Data Recovery In Hampshire
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…
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MacBook Pro Woes
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…
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Seagate Barracuda 7200 Data Recovery
Seagate Barracuda drives are often thought of as premium quality hard drives, which is largely true. The build quality of these drives is solid and they feel heavy and look good when compared to some other drives. They are however still susceptible to the same failures and problems which affect other hard drives. More info about our Seagate Data Recovery Services can be found here. Firmware Faults A common problem with Seagate Barracuda drives is firmware corruption (sometimes known as SA Corruption). This is something which can be fixed without taking the drive apart, however sometimes the extent of the…
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FreeNAS; NAS for free
We have recently been trying out FreeNAS as a way to add some storage to our internal network. First impressions are positive. We are able to utilise an old spare low power PC to run the software from a compact flash card.