I’ve often warned against using Ai for something as delicate as data recovery. So I thought I’d run an experiment to see how easy it is to do damage when following the prompts.
I was quite impressed that it actually suggested getting professional service instead of blithely launching into a recovery or repair process. You’d have to actively ignore a lot of warnings to do damage after following along!
Here was my prompt:
my samsung t7 is not mounting in finder and shows as greyed out in disk utility. How can i get the data back?
ChatGPT said:
If your Samsung T7 appears greyed out in Disk Utility but won’t mount in Finder, there’s still a chance you can recover your data. The important thing is to avoid doing anything that might overwrite the files or make the drive harder to recover.
Then after some basic connection and USB cable troubleshooting, ChatGPT said:
Let’s focus on Portsmouth, Hampshire. For your Samsung T7, these are two local specialists worth contacting first.1
Expert Data Recovery | About Us Dataquest International Ltd – Data Recovery 24 Domum Road, Copnor, Portsmouth PO2 0QZ Specialises in external-drive and SSD recovery, including Samsung drives that won’t mount. Its website advertises a free initial assessment and a no-recovery, no-fee policy.
Data Recovery +1 Phone: 023 9267 1330 Website: www.dq-int.co.uk Data recovery options in Portsmouth
My first call would be Dataquest, because it explicitly advertises Samsung external SSD recovery. Before handing over the drive, explain that the data is irreplaceable and ask them to image the drive before attempting filesystem repairs.
Until then, keep the T7 disconnected. Don’t run First Aid or recovery software on it.
ChatGPT is AI and can make mistakes.
Footnotes
I’ve removed the other company, as they are not actually a data recovery place 🤦♂️ ↩︎
Intel Optane has been around for a while, and can improve SSD performance by combining “Optane Memory” (fast storage) and a standard SSD. For servers this requires plugging in independent Optane devices. The H10 SSD however comes as a single standard form factor m.2 SSD. The two devices are created by internally splitting the PCIe lanes and providing two separate SSDs over the same connector: one small and fast, the other larger and relatively slower. This allows the host computer to create a lop-sided RAID or cache, where the benefits of both devices are seamlessly blended together to create a large capacity and faster SSD. That is, until something goes wrong. If either half has a problem, the whole thing stops working.
Note: This is similar to Apple’s Fusion Drive system which uses a separate hard drive and SSD to achieve even larger combined drives, but at the expense of speed.
Symptoms of a Failed Optane SSD
After failing to boot, a common symptom of a failed Optane H10 SSD is that any attempts to recover the data will yield an almost empty Windows volume, with little or no user data. They almost appear as a fresh install. If you fail to correctly combine the two devices, you’ll get a very poor recovery result.
Using professional data recovery hardware, we can address the two devices independently, and read and repair them. We can then take a copy of each device, and recombine them in software to gain access to the data.
If you need Optane recovery, let us know.
Contact Us Now…
For a fast reply from a real person.
Issues
Another potential roadblock here is Bitlocker encryption. It is supposed to be impossible to enable bitlocker without making a key backup to a Microsoft account, but we’ve seen countless cases where this went wrong. Effectively locking the disk and throwing away the key.
One of the worst hard drives we’ve ever seen for data recovery
We recently heard from a local fisherman that had been unfortunate to have his boat take on water whilst moored during a storm. Due to a series of unfortunate events, the only record of his fishing pots out at sea were stored on the ship computers. These computers were not only submerged in seawater, but also diesel from the engines.
Our first step was to carefully extract the storage drives from the computers. One contained a 128GB InnoDisk EverGreen SSD, and the other a Toshiba Hard Drive.
We decontaminated the surfaces of the drives, to make them easier to deal with. We don’t often have diesel soaked disks in our workshop.
A Warning ⚠️
It is important with any liquid damage to make sure there is nothing still wet before you apply power.
The SSD
We removed the SSD circuit board from its shell, and found that water and diesel were present inside. Using a combination of chemical cleaners and delicate pads and brushes, we cleaned the board, and then let it dry thoroughly.
Water and diesel damaged InnoDisk EverGreen SSD
Once dry, we checked for short circuits, and found that the device wasn’t shorted. We applied power, but the SSD failed to reach a ready state. Although the main power rail wasn’t shorted, there must have been a problem further downstream. We found an area of the board that was getting no power, and found a damaged SMD resistor nearby. Replacing that got the drive correctly identified, and we were able to make a full clone copy of the disk.
Once the clone was complete, we were able to recover the files containing the fishing data, and send to the customer to have reloaded onto a replacement unit.
So far, so good.
The HDD
Some of the screws on the circuit board were a bit corroded, but the board itself looked in a reasonable state. Most boards can be adapted using the ROM chip, so rather than attempt to repair the board, we saved the ROM chip contents, and wrote it to a matched board.
As with the SSD, it was important to make sure no water had got into the delicate parts of the drive. People assume that hard drives are sealed, but almost1 all disks have a small breather hole, to allow for the pressure inside to equalise during normal use. We’ve seen many water damaged disks where no water managed to get through the hole, but this was not one of them. Inside this drive was full of thick, almost jelly like liquid.
Water and diesel damaged Toshiba hard drive
We didn’t hold out much hope, especially as there seemed to be concentric rings on the disk surface, which usually indicate scratches from the heads. Fortunately after a thorough clean, we noticed that the rings were caused by the shape of the top cover. Not damage, just rings of sediment / dirt.
We removed and cleaned the disc, and then placed it into a donor casting. The only original part of the hard drive was the single glass disk, and the ROM contents.
With a bit of manipulation on the data recovery kit, the drive showed up and allowed us to load the filesystem to see the files and folders. When working in this way, all sectors we read are simultaneously saved to another disk. This allows us to build up a copy of the disk over multiple passes, without having to read the same parts over and over again (the next time we request the same sector, it comes from our copy instead of the failing disk). It’s how we always work, but really makes sense with disks like this in such terrible condition.
After four sets of new heads, we finally had the fishing data recovered from the disk. Looking back at the photos, it’s hard to believe that any recovery was possible in this case.
Luckily, the data required from this sort of thing is usually small lists of numbers, coordinates etc, so can be possible to read even if the drive is in a bad state.
The first battle when attempting to recover one of these LaCie SSDs is getting into the thing! Fortunately LaCie have used this design before for external hard drives, so we’ve already figured it out. It’s not for the faint of heart though. You need to carefully, and delicately slip a strong bare Stanley blade into the seam on the back of the device. This is just thin enough to slide in without damaging the Aluminium, but strong enough to not snap. Warning, do not try this at home! There’s a knack to it, and you could easily slice off something fleshy by mistake.
LaCie External Mobile SSD
The next bonus is the controller chip — A Seagate branded Phison chip, for which we have excellent support in our tools.
The Diagnosis
When connected via the USB-C port, the bridge interface is correctly identified, but it shows no attached media. (Like a CD drive with no disc inserted.) This usually indicates that the bridge device is working OK, but the SSD is not.
When connected by SATA to our tools, we can see that the drive is stuck in Safe Mode, AKA Firmware Update Mode. The main clue is the capacity reported as just 2MB. This can happen when the drive firmware is unable to fully load, so instead reverts to safe mode.
In this case we can upload temporary custom firmware to the SSD and then read from the original NAND chips to find the data. The rebuild went well, and we were able to access all the files. Some errors were reported during the file extraction, so we suspect that one of the NAND chips had started to fail.
This was an excellent drive to work on, and the outcome was ideal. Fortunately nobody had messed with the drive before it got to us, so the NAND storage hadn’t fully degraded.
If you have a failed LaCie Mobile SSD and would like help getting it recovered…
Deleting files and formatting disks just got a whole lot more dangerous!
Back in the good old days1, before fast SSDs, and multi Terabyte disks, if you accidentally deleted a file, you could be fairly confident that you could get it back. In classic Mac OS, it wasn’t uncommon to have Norton UnErase running every time your Mac shut down, to show a list of deleted files for you to optionally restore.
Not to be overdramatic, but those days are pretty much gone.
If you have deleted data or a formatted disk, power it off and get in touch with us right away. There is a small window of time where recovery is possible in some cases. The process requires specialist tools and equipment that costs thousands per-year, and any other type of access will erase the data for good!
Contact Us Now…
For a fast reply from a real person.
What changed?
With modern disks you cannot run a quick undelete to recover files. In fact, even powering on a disk after you deleted some files could actually destroy those files permanently.
For various technical reasons2, disks now need to keep track of which sectors are in use. This allows them to carry out background “housekeeping” tasks to keep the disks running smoothly. Modern operating systems issue a TRIM command when you empty the recycle bin, to let the disk know which sectors are no longer in-use. The disk will then erase those sectors and add them back to the pool of available sectors.
An example of some disks that likely wipe out deleted / formatted data
Western Digital (WD) My Passport drives from 2TB+
Seagate external drives from 2TB+
SD / microSD / SDHC / SDXC cards
m.2 SATA SSDs
m.2 NVMe SSDs
SATA SSDS
iPhones / iPads / Android phones & Tablets
+ Lots of other variations of the above!
If you’re unsure, you should safely unplug the disk ASAP, and get in touch. We’ll hopefully be able to let you know the chances of recovery.
Conclusion
If you accidentally delete some files, or accidentally format a modern disk, your chances of recovering those files are greatly reduced. Act fast and turn off the disk ASAP. You may prevent the data being lost for good, but it will likely need to be recovered by a professional. If that happens, you must let them know the situation, so they can handle it properly.
Good luck!
Footnotes
Before 2008 for MacBook Air users, with SSDs instead of HDDs ↩︎
Cheap / dense storage chips, or SMR hard drives ↩︎
Your quick response to an SSD with data loss could now make the difference between a successful or failed data recovery.
The Short Version
If you have an SSD with missing or deleted data, you must power off the device as fast (and safely) as possible to retain the data. You shouldn’t power the drive again after that. Even just powered up and idle, the SSD will run background processes to start cleaning out sectors marked as deleted. Like a snake eating its own tail, you’ll be destroying the data as you attempt to recover it. ♾️
The Long Version
Modern consumer SSDs use a combination of cheap multi1-layered flash storage chips, and smart software to spread out the written data over the whole device. Known as wear levelling, these algorithms are intended to prevent frequently used sectors from wearing out prematurely.
For context, on a traditional2 hard disk, every time you request a sector, the same sector gets shown3. If a sector had old data inside, you could recover it until the data was replaced with something else. This is the basis of all traditional wisdom about deleted files not really being deleted. However, on a wear-levelled SSD you can never be so sure. The first time you save a file, it will get written to one sector from the pool. Once you delete the file stored there, if you request the same sector, the SSD will shuffle the pack and give you a fresh new sector from somewhere else. This drastically reduces the opportunity to recover deleted files.
There is an additional problem when you add TRIM into the mix. When carrying out certain disk tasks like emptying the recycle bin or reformatting, the operating system also sends a TRIM command. This lets the SSD know which sectors are no longer in use. From this moment, you have a matter of seconds or minutes to power off the device before it starts erasing those blocks of data.
A Solution
If you power off your disk in time, we have tools that allow us to load custom firmware on many brands of SSD. This firmware runs temporarily on the SSD RAM before the normal SSD tasks can start. This blocks the SSD from making any further changes to the stored data. If caught early, this can be enough to allow us to extract the missing files.
If not caught early, there is still more we can do. We can attempt to rebuild maps of sectors that were recently TRIMmed, and add these back to our clone drive. This is less than perfect, as usually some of that data has already gone. In many cases some data is better than nothing!
For a long time, we had to treat SSDs much the same as hard drives. Now we have specific tools and procedures in place to make sure we can still extract the maximum possible data from them.
If you’ve lost data from any device, get in touch as soon as possible. We never want to see people losing data, so we’ll always advise the best way forward.
In the last few years, soldered storage has gone from a strange Apple quirk, to a standard way of manufacturing laptops. There was outrage when apple first started soldering RAM and storage, but you’ll now find soldered SSDs in laptops from Microsoft, HP, Dell, and any other manufacturer you can think of. That’s not to mention all the millions of phones & tablets with soldered storage.
Benefits
From a manufacturing point of view, soldering the SSDs makes sense. Fewer “bulky” connectors on the motherboard can lead to thinner and lighter computers. Because a 5mm thick laptop is just not thin enough! There are also performance benefits by integrating the components closer together. See the PlayStation 5 and M1/M2 Macs for examples of that performance taken to the extreme.
Recovery Problems
But there are huge downsides to soldered storage when things go wrong. You can’t just whip out the SSD and access the files. And even if you went to the trouble of desoldering the chips, you’ll often find they are encrypted. In some cases the only way forward is to attempt to repair the original damaged motherboard, or transfer numerous undocumented components to a working replacement board. Lack of schematics from the manufacturers mean this type of work is often time consuming, and therefore expensive.
E-Waste
Even ignoring the problems with recovering data from soldered parts, there is a new problem of electronic waste. When a pluggable SSD or RAM module fails, it can be replaced. If those parts are soldered to the board, you’re probably sending the whole thing off to landfill, or “recycling” as it’s sometimes known.
Solutions
The number of recovery options are as varied as the devices themselves. If you have a faulty device with soldered storage, get in touch. In many cases there are ways to recover the data.
It’s been a longtimesince I’ve written about iPods on this blog. 2008 was the last post I could find.
In that time, SD cards have become so cheap they’re almost disposable, and iPods have virtually disappeared from normal life. But I still have one, and I still love it. I built this FrankenPod about ten years ago from a pile of broken iPods so it’s always looked a mess. The back cover came from an 80GB iPod Classic, an 80GB hard drive from a MacBook Air, and all the other internal parts were scavenged from various broken iPods. The plastic screen was already covered in scratches, so I never felt too bad about stuffing it into a pocket with coins or other junk. Not my usual style!
Upgrade Time
The battery had started to show its age so I set about replacing it. I assume parts will eventually start getting hard to find, but eBay is still full of spares for now.
I had to dismantle the iPod to replace the battery anyway, so I had a look at the other parts to see what else I could fix up. Then I remembered the iFlash adapter. I’d previously used a similar adapter to add a Compact Flash card to an iPod 4G, so I checked to see if there was an updated ZIF adapter. There sure is! And better yet, it works with super cheap, fairly fast SD cards. Add that to the parts list.
Fortunately, the scratched exterior screen on this iPod has protected the delicate LCD screen inside, which is still in perfect condition. The Clickwheel™️, headphone port, and dock connector are all in good enough condition to keep.
My original plan for the front case of the iPod was to strip it down to bare metal and then prime and repaint it. I wanted something unique so thought I’d end up going for a bright yellow or chrome effect paint.
Enter The Rat 🐀
Scruffy Rat VW Bus
I started sanding the surface and realised how tough the anodised metal is. How it got so scratched up is a genuine mystery. I think this thing would survive a nuclear war. I went to work with sanding disks, grinding wheels and all sorts of abrasives and barely got through the top layer. As I was sanding, I started to like the way the iPod looked. My new idea was a RatPod. In the style of rat bikes, I would leave the outer surface looking messed up, but upgrade the internal parts. I couldn’t bear looking through the scratched screen though so still went for a replacement on that. I finished sanding the rough bits off, and making the surface silky smooth. The way all the edges are outlined by bare shiny aluminium looks pretty cool 😎.
iFlash
I chose the iFlash Solo for this project. This lets me swap the hard drive for a cheap SD card. My iTunes Library is only around 35GB so a single 64GB SD card will give me plenty of space for the future. (iFlash also sell adapters that take mSATA SSDs, or multiple SD cards for up to 1TB of music.) They ran a test a few years back about different storage options and found that microSD cards are pretty hard to beat for cost & power consumption, at the loss of a tiny amount of speed. They’re still way quicker than the old HDD, so that’s what I went with. The iFlash Solo has a full size SD slot, so I used the micro adapter that came with the Sandisk card.
Restore
While waiting for the screen glass to be delivered from China, I decided to connect all the other new parts and test the iFlash adapter. With everything loosely assembled I plugged in the USB cable, launched iTunes, clicked “Restore” and then…
The iPod could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1394). ⚠️
Uh oh ☹️. I clicked “More Information” and expected the usual generic message. Instead I actually got a clue. It said the restore may fail if the battery is too flat. I can’t help but wonder how long this battery had sat in a box before I bought it. Anyway, I waited impatiently until the iPod was fully charged and then boom! iPod restored without issues. I loaded up some music and gave it a play. It works fine, and nice and quick.
The Finished Article
The finished iPod Classic.
I’ve only had this finished for about a week, but already there are a few things to note:
Starts playing music almost instantly
Feels really lightweight
Now shockproof
Perfect in the car
With the new battery, this thing lasts forever!
I was worried about support in macOS Catalina, but it’s OK
Update After a Week of Use
I had a few teething troubles with the iPod that didn’t appear immediately. After a few days working fine, I started getting intermittent skipped songs, or the iPod would just stop playing in the middle of an album. If left in this state, the iPod would eventually run out of battery and then need to be plugged in to bring back to life.
HFS+ What?
As I was using this iPod with my Mac, it gets reformatted to HFS+ during a restore. Information about MacPods is hard to find, but often the Windows formatted iPods need to be reformatted a particular way to prevent issues. As an attempted workaround, I’m currently using the iPod formatted for Windows, to see if that sorts out the skipping problem. You can use Windows formatted iPods on Mac but not the other way around. I’ll see how it goes.
Update 2021
Despite working mostly OK, I still had some occasional freezes with this iPod. I decided to crack it open again and try a different brand of SD card. I got a Samsung EVO plus 64GB, and touch wood, it’s been fine since. I’ve since checked the compatibility chart on iFlash, and it does have reports of problems with the SanDisk card I used before.
An important part of data recovery is staying ahead of new technology. It’s important that we are able to recover data from wherever people currently store their files. People once stored their most valuable data on a hard drive in their PC. Making hard drives is complicated and expensive, so only a handful of manufacturers had the resources to build them. The relatively small number of brands allowed us to became experts in the way those disks work & fail. Over time, some of those manufacturers merged or went bust. There are now just a few factories building disks. That’s not to say hard drive technology is standing still, it’s just a small enough target to keep an eye on. When Seagate release a new family of disks we scrabble around for a little while, and then ultimately find out how they work.
Enter the SSD
Solid State Drives have been on the horizon for a long time now. In fact, the three Macs within arms reach of me right now all have SSDs in them. The biggest problem for me, is that the barrier to entry to make SSDs is really low. There are thousands of factories in China alone with the capability to pump out millions of SSDs. Just buy some controllers and NAND chips, solder them to a circuit board — Instant SSD.
The Numbers
In 2018 there are only three hard drive manufacturers left. By comparison there are 35 SSD manufacturers listed — without including all the white-label, rebadged, refurbished, grey-market & clone drives in the market. If we estimate that each manufacturer produces three different product lines, you’ll get to 105 different types of SSD vs nine hard drive families. In fairness, I can think off the top of my head that some of these hard drive brands have more than three families of disk, but you get the idea. Staying on top of all those brands quickly goes from difficult to impossible.
The Future of Data Recovery
You’ve got to wonder if the future of data recovery will be choosing even smaller niches. Some companies may focus on recovering just one or two brands of SSD, and know that they at least have a chance of staying up to date with the latest technology.
Dead Ends
SSDs present a number of new obstacles to data recovery. Some of these are not challenges as much as actual show-stopping dead ends.
Does your SSD controller use encryption, wear levelling & compression? The answer is yes for most SSDs. What happens to the data if that controller fails? In some cases this means the data is gone for good. In other cases it could mean weeks or months of manual work. You can’t just solder on a replacement controller as it won’t have the necessary encryption keys, nor will it have any idea of where the data has been stored across the multiple NAND chips.
Apple’s PCIe SSDs have always proven challenging for data recovery. We have a good success rate with them, however many of our tools don’t even support working at PCI level. This particular SSD provided a new challenge though.
The SSD we received was initially showing up correctly in the system. Upon access, the disk would read a few bytes and then stop reading. The SSD would remain visible to the system but not respond to any further commands. The only way to bring it back was to cycle power. Yep, the IT classic — Turn it off and on again! The problem is, PCI cards don’t come with on-off switches so the solution needed to work within software.
Brainstorming
First I thought a copy task with a scheduled reboot may get the device back online, however I quickly found out PCI slots stay powered on during a reboot 🤦♀️ This means once the device gets stuck, a reboot won’t bring it back on.
My second idea was to schedule shutdowns but the time taken to boot and then restart the copy process seemed like a nightmare.
The Solution
In the end I found a series of commands which could keep a fairly steady copy process going. The main idea was:
Start a copy task
Pause on error
Toggle the PCI connection using low-level commands
Resume the copy task
Rinse & repeat
Although not the most elegant solution, this process cycled through 647 times, taking an average of 760MB per cycle. In less than 24 hours the whole 512GB device was cloned to another disk ready for recovery.
After this script finished I did find a slightly cleaner way to reset the PCI slot which will result in much faster recoveries in the future.
I was unable to find any mention of this type of recovery online, so if anyone else knows about it, they’re keeping it to themselves. If you know anyone with a failed Mac SSD, get in touch. This is just one of the many solutions we have for recovering them.
