We are working on a Samsung 60GB where the drive is not being recognized by the customer’s computer. After diagnosing the drive, the reason why the drive was not being recognized was because of bad sectors, possibly media damage on platter 0. Nevertheless, after a full image of the rest of the drive, we were [...] Continue Reading
A customer brought in a Seagate 1TB (ST1000DM003) drive in today. The drive was dropped from a short distance and now is making clicking sounds while mounted. We will have to open this drive in our Clean Room to see if there is any damage to the platters and the read/write heads. Let’s go!
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We opened a Seagate 1TB in our Clean Room and after opening the drive cover, it was immediately clear from the condition of the air filter that things weren’t looking good. The air filter was almost completely black. We removed the read/write heads from the drive and unfortunately all of the heads had traces of [...] Continue Reading
Worked on a Western Digital WD1600JB Drive with heavy media damage. Unfortunately, the data is unrecoverable. All surfaces of the platters have media damage.
Another case that’s unrecoverable due to constant attempts by the customer to use software to recover the data while it was clicking. PLEASE don’t attempt to recover the data on your [...] Continue Reading
We opened a Western Digital in our Clean Room. We removed the read/write heads and they looked good for the most part with the naked eye. But under the microscope, we can see the Head 8 (the head that reads from the top platter) has traces of shrapnel on it. The good news is that [...] Continue Reading
After soldering off the NAND chips and reading it from the USB drive, we were able to recover 100% of the customer’s data by doing a Chip Off Data Recovery. There were no damaged or lost files. Nevertheless, the customer was super happy!
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We got in a Western Digital drive that was making noise when mounted. We opened the drive cover in our Clean Room and the issue with the drive was Stiction. This is where the read/write heads that hover over the platters get stuck on the platters, not allowing them to spin, thus creating that strange [...] Continue Reading
This is a close up of the SSD we’ve been working on. Very unusual for this model drive to have this kind of controller.
Let’s see how this goes!
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In order to recover the data from the Sandisk SSD 250GB, we will solder off the NAND chips and try to read them. Then we would rebuild the data by figuring out the order of the chips and the algorithm that puts the data together. This type of recovery will be the Chip Off Data [...] Continue Reading
We are working on a Western Digital Elements 1TB where the drive was not being recognized. The drive was also making clicking sounds. After opening the drive in our Clean Room, we discovered visible minor dust inside. There aren’t viable scratches on the top platter so that’s an excellent sign. One of the read/write heads [...] Continue Reading