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.
-
Fake Seagate Samsung Hitachi Drive
Over the past decade, hard drive companies have been endlessly bought-out and then re-sold. At this point I’ve pretty much lost track of who manufactures which brands now. Since all this restructuring, it’s quite common to see portable Seagate branded drives with Samsung disks inside & vice versa. There are also Maxtor branded versions of those same drives in some markets. So what’s wrong with this disk? Here’s a list of some of the problems with this disk: Unfinished labelling (the white edges are usually peeled off) Mismatched serial numbers Wrong PCB for a Seagate / Samsung disk Wrong capacity…
-
Fusion Drive Data Recovery
Urgent Warning: Fusion Drive always consists of two separate disks. If you want your data back you must get both parts. We’ve heard a number of reports that users with failed Fusion Drives are only given the Hard Disk back when receiving Apple repairs. On its own, the hard drive is not enough to recover all data in original condition. This is especially true if FileVault encryption is used. What is Fusion Drive? Fusion Drive is Apple’s version of a hybrid solid state & mechanical disk. It combines a small fast SSD with a large slow hard drive to achieve a balance…
-
OCZ Z-Drive 4500 PCIe SSD Recovery
I published a post back in 2016 highlighting the problem we were seeing with Sandforce controllers on single SSD drives. We have now also come across this PCIe 3.2TB SSD that uses a Marvel controller as well as Sandforce controllers to control banks of data chips. Like the others, this device has I/O errors which we believe is caused by the Sandforce controllers. This PCIe SSD device requires proprietary drivers for it to be recognised in the bios and OS, regardless of what platform it is run on. Although we can communicate with the device via an SSD Utility provided…
-
Seagate Ultra Slim Portable Drives
Seagate has another batch of dubious drives in circulation at the moment. These slim disks are often used in external Ultra Slim Portable enclosures, but also appear in laptops. Visually these disks have a new-look design that seems a bit strange at first glance. For starters, instead of a solid metal top cover, these disks only have a partial top lid, sealed by nothing more than the printed label. If you decided to peel the sticker from one of these, you’d be unsealing the top cover and allow dust to fall straight onto the disks. This is BAD. Aside from…
-
OS X Base System Data Lost
We’ve seen a few cases recently where a user has unexpected lost all data, and been left with a disk named OS X Base System. Inside the disk is a file named Install macOS Sierra or Install macOS High Sierra, and a few other system files. The OS X Base System is usually part of a macOS installer or update, so it’s unclear how disks ended up getting replaced with this. If this has happened to you, we’d love to hear more about how. We can usually recover these disks, but it’s really important that you stop using the disk as…
-
MacBook Escape Data Recovery
The MacBook Pro (Late 2016) comes with 50% more escape key than you’ll ever need. It also comes with a strange SSD so we had to get creative to recover them. In short, we can recover them! More info at the link below. MacBook Pro (Late 2016) Data Recovery
-
Seagate SSHD ST500LM000 Recovery Update
I have good news for our customers, our developers have been working hard and have produced a solution to the firmware failures of this model hard drive. I posted a blog alerting our customers back in March 2015 when we started to see the problems arise. A solution was tested just before the end of last year and we now have a process that fixes these issues. We also have firmware fixes and recovery solutions for other Seagate Hard Drives.
-
ATP 259: I Hired Myself
ATP – 259: I Hired Myself ? TL;DR/L – Storage is hard. Move your data with you. Make redundant copies. Don’t trust manufacturer-quoted lifespans. In this week’s Ask ATP, the guys got a question about long-term data storage. As my accidental pet subject, I always pay close attention to storage-related chat. Fortunately whenever our hosts talk about storage it’s from a thoughtful & sufficiently cautious point of view. They know that storage is unsafe, and then plan ways round it. After hearing their countless conversations about Synology & Backblaze I know I can always trust ATP on this topic. I don’t…
-
First, Do No Harm
The maxim “first, do no harm” is a great first rule for data recovery, and is at the heart of our whole approach. If you’ve lost data, it’s only natural to panic, but the safest thing to do is stop and get advice. It’s usually best to switch everything off, but there are rare times where you wouldn’t want to do that either. When you should switch off a failed disk If the drive has failed completely and you can’t access the data, definitely switch it off. If the disk is clicking, or making strange noises, switch it off. Certain…
-
Meltdown and Spectre Data Recovery
More than enough has been written about the Spectre & Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities so I won’t go over them directly here. If you’d like more info, I’ve included some links at the end. My interest is more with the trouble caused by the intended fixes. Despite CPU manufacturers testing the fixes for some months, in certain circumstances they are causing random reboots, and other performance problems. Safely Remove To “Safely Remove” a disk is standard practice to avoid filesystem corruption. In simple terms, the computer stops writing to the disk and then you’re safe to unplug it. In the case…