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.
-
Old Industrial Equipment Data Recovery
It’s always interesting to see how a complex manufacturing line can be run from such old hardware. In this case we were sent a custom PC from a machine that is used to fill and cap bottles. The first problem was trying to get the case open to remove the hard drive. There is no ifixit guide for this thing! Inside I found a 20GB Seagate laptop drive (dated 2007) running Windows 2000 along with the programs that control the machinery. The hard drive was connected to a proprietary motherboard that in turn connected to the machinery via serial ports. In this case,…
-
The Worst Head Crash Ever?
I’ve seen some pretty serious head crashes in my time. The worst part of my job is knowing I’ll have to tell someone their data is gone forever. Sometimes media damage can be subtle enough that it’s impossible difficult to even detect by eye. Other times the damage is obvious. Today was one of the clearest I’ve ever seen. What’s worse is that we got two of these identical disks from the same Mac Pro, with identical damage. You have to see it to believe it… It’s difficult to know how long these damaged disks were left spinning, but it looks like…
-
Seagate Barracuda Ramp Weakness
During a recent RAID 5 recovery attempt, John made an interesting discovery inside the two failed disks. The plastic ramp that the heads park onto when idle had snapped in the same position on both drives. We don’t know if the heads got damaged first, and then broke the ramps during parking, or if the ramps broke first, damaging the heads as they parked. The client told us the disks were not dropped or jolted. Whatever the cause, both disks had scratches to the delicate magnetic surfaces. In this case, two failed disks from a four disk RAID 5 means…
-
eBay Fake Capacity USB Sticks
Update: Read The 2021 Update Here! Despite some amount of publicity, the problem of fake capacity flash drives being sold online has still not gone away. Recently we did a bit of consumer investigation and bought a few to test. Surely after two or three years eBay will have sorted this problem out? What Are Fake Capacity Flash Drives? If you’ve not heard of these before, a fake capacity flash drive is simply a small low capacity flash drive pretending to have (much) more storage. The clever / devious part is that they may have only 16GB of real storage,…
-
SandForce SSD Data Recovery Problems
The low prices and high speed access of the Sandforce controller made it an appealing option for SSD manufacturers such as Toshiba, Intel, Kingston & OCX. But it soon became a problem for users when the SSD devices using these controllers started to fail in their computers after just six months of use. Usually it resulted in the device not being recognised by the computer bios, and not functioning at all. That was okay if you were happy to have it replaced under warranty by the manufacturer. The problem came when you wished to try and recover critical data that may have…
-
APFS Data Recovery
When Apple release the latest version of macOS (named Sierra) in Autumn, it will include the new APFS filesystem. Apple haven’t launched a new FS for a long time, and this filesystem won’t work for bootable disks at first. Eventually Apple will make this the default filesystem across the whole product line, from the iPhone, through to the Mac. APFS Upgrade In Place I have heard that Apple will release a tool to upgrade an existing HFS+ volume to APFS. If you run the upgrade I strongly advise you to make at least a couple of backups first. I would suggest a Time Machine backup and a bootable full disk…
-
Seagate SSHD ST4000DX001 Data Recovery
I previously posted about a Seagate SSHD ST500LM000 hybrid hard drive which failed to spin. This hard drive was put into our R&D process due to the type of the failure and further analysis confirmed that the problem was relating to the Solid State part of the drive. At the time I had only seen this type of failure with the Seagate Thin SSHD laptop drives. But since then we have now received Seagate desktop SSHD hard drives with the same type of failure. Because the SSHD hybrid drives are a cheaper option to SSD drives I am seeing more of them in for data recovery.…
-
Broken USB Stick
I had a call on Friday from a very distraught lady who had dropped her laptop with her USB stick still plugged in. Unfortunately the USB stick took the brunt of the impact and all her work was no longer accessible. She contacted us and I reassured her that although the device was broken, we have a good chance of getting the data back. With time spent on the Broken USB Stick over the course of the day on Saturday, I was able to recover all of the data. I managed to get the data back to her on Sunday morning,…
-
Top 3 Coffees in Portsmouth
It’s probably worth a quick explanation here. Why is this data recovery blog so interested in coffee? Well personally I love coffee, but I also often recover data from hard drives that have been for a drink (or a swim). So there’s my excuse, now back to the coffee! Fortunately for caffeine addicts in Portsmouth like me, there are plenty of places to get your fix. I’m the sort of person that finds somewhere I like, and then just keeps going back there forever. Sometimes though, it’s worth having a look at the other options. My current top three places for coffee in Portsmouth are below in no…
-
What Is A Clean Room
Some parts of our data recovery process require us to open a hard drive for internal repairs. We have a walk in clean room area on site, that allows us to carry out the necessary rework. It consists of an overhead air shower unit with a sealed enclosure that cleans and circulates the air within a specified tolerance. To keep particles to a minimum we wear a gown, gloves, and face mask to prevent contamination from outside. All hard drives are built in a clean room environment. Keeping small air particles out is crucial due the the complexity of the internal…