Typical data recovery cases

Here are some examples of common data recovery cases we handle in our data-to-day operation. For a complete list of models and manufacturers we can recover data from please visit our Supported models page.

• Western Digital drive with burnt logic board (PCB) that doesn't spin up. You can try to use a donor PCB of the same model but the fact is that ROM chip on most WD families nowadays contains special parameters called adaptives that are unique for the particular drive and PCB cannot be just swapped without proper ROM preparation. In reality, not only WD, but most modern hard drives have adaptives in ROM. This is because of higher density and very precise mechanics of today's technology.

• Maxtor drive spins up fine, recalibrates, but identifies in BIOS with zero capacity by its factory alias(Calypso, N40P, Sabre etc) and as soon as you try to boot up or read data you get nothing but errors. This drive has corrupted translator. Translator is a part of hard drive firmware responsible for converting internal cylinder-head-sector addressing into OS-understandable LBA scheme. Without translator you will never get a single byte out of the drive. Using our tools we are able to access system area of the drive to fix translator and other firmware modules. In fact, hard drives of all manufacturers experience problems with translator. The symptoms are usually the same.

• Another example we are seeing more and more in the last year is laptop Toshiba GAS or GAX family drives with damaged bearings. The motor is either stuck completely and makes slight ticking/scratching sounds(click to listen) or it tries to spin up with loud grinding noise(click to listen). Normally most data recovery companies would try swapping platters into good working drive and this is one of the most difficult, thus more expensive jobs in data recovery. For this case we have our know-how technology that doesn't involve opening the drive and makes this kind of restoration fairly easy and therefore less expensive.

• Hard drive with lots of bad sectors. Cheap consumer data recovery software would just skip defective sectors, freeze, scratch(click to listen) or even start clicking(click to listen) on them causing more and more damage. Recovery process can run for ages on such drives. Imaging tools we use can quickly and carefully process timed out sectors and read bad sectors ignoring sector checksum - sometimes this can be the only way to pull data out.

• Drive makes constant knocking or scratching sound(click to listen). Most technicians may think this drive has bad heads and attempt head swap. At this point it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics. But actually from our experience about 40% of clicking Hitachi and WD drives have problems with firmware modules in system area and can be fixed without head swap. Drives with damaged heads are also not a problem for our technicians. We have all necessary equipment, knowledge and experience to successfully handle this kind of failures.

• Seagate SCSI Cheetah drive is identifed correctly in BIOS but shows 0 capacity. As soon as you try reading sectors it gives nothing but Medium Error. This is a typical firmware corruption for Seagate SCSI. Our engineers can repair this problem using our specialized SCSI utilities.

This is a far from full list of possible hard drive problems we are able to take care of in our lab. Please ask if you have anything not mentioned here.