on May 23 2011 in Data Recovery tagged by Emanuel
The hard drive was dropped on the floor and the data was not accessible. After that incident, when the customer tried to access the hard drive, there was an error reading “the hard drive needs to be formatted. “
Immediately the customer took the hard drive to a local data recovery company in Bellevue WA, but after few attempts the only few files that were recovered ware completely corrupted and inaccessible.
I personally had a look at these recovered files. There were less than 100 documents and pictures and when I tried to access one of this retrieved files, there was an error message that this file is corrupted and will not open.
One of our data recovery partners in Bellevue referred the customer to our lab.
As soon the external hard drive arrived at our lab we completely removed it from the enclosure and did the visual inspection as well as the hardware test.
We noticed after the head test was done that the head #4 was damaged, so before we started the head replacement procedure, we started the cloning procedure with the head #4 disabled.
After the cloning procedure was completed and all sectors ware read, we replaced the heads assembly and started to read the rest of the sectors after enabling the head #4.
The hard drive had about 480 bad sectors, which in my book it was pretty good after all these attempts to recover the data with a bad head after the hard drive was drooped.
Please be aware that dropping the hard drive can create a lot more damage than in this particular case. Most common consequences are stuck or sized spindle motor, damaged heads, scratched media platters.
Now back to our particular case. After cloning all sectors from the Western Digital 1.0Tb WD10EADS to the new destination drive we noticed that every single sector was affected by same type of encryption or a damaged translator.
We started running different utilities but there was no success in retrieving the data at this time.
We did couple more tests and we discovered the root of the problem, which was in the actual controller of the external hard drive.
So we connected the cloned Western Digital hard drive to the external enclosure and after scanning the cloned hard drive for data we were able to recover 100% of the data.
We recovered over 35,000 pictures and videos all accessible with no translation error or any type of corruption.
Disclosure: this article is for reference only. The name of some tools and also some of the important steps are maintained confidential.
If the data is critical, send it to the experts www.emandatarecovery.com. Phone: (425) 347-3732.
Many thanks to our partner, who recommended the customer to our shop.
We pay a 10% spiff to you for any recommendation of our service to any of your customers.
If you want to become a partner please visit our site and click on the Partner tab.
Copyright: E-man Data Recovery LLC
on May 23 2011 in Data Recovery tagged by Emanuel
We received this hard drive from a customer that had just picked it up from a company with a known name in the data recovery industry. The company was unable to recover the stored data due to the scratches on the first platter surface.
Upon opening the hard drive in a clean room environment we noticed the o-ring shape scrapes on the platter. After removing the heads we discovered that head number 4 was damaged and covered in magnetic dust from the scratched platter.
You can check the filter of the hard drive for particles; if the damage is severe then the filter will look very dirty. If the damage is not that severe then the filter will not disclose the damage unless it is observed under a microscope.
In this case we were able to forego checking the filter because the damage was very obvious. The o-ring was on the second platter the upper side.
Given the poor condition of the hard drive we decided that the best chance of recovering data would be to remove the bad head and replace it from a donor drive. The challenge was to do this and minimize the damage to the second platter while preventing the head from getting damaged when we had to read the data from the first platter.
Our solution was to read the data from this hard drive starting with the first two heads, while disabling heads three and four. There was still the question of what might happen when the active heads reached the damaged area from the second platter, even if we didn’t want to read the sectors from that area yet.
We marked the platters, removed the damaged platter and replaced it with a platter from the donor drive. (Some of the experts are shaking their heads.) Remember, it was the second platter we replaced, the firmware was on the first platter and to read that area we needed that head number one and first platter to be ok, which it was. After removing the second platter and installing a donor platter we were pleasantly surprised that the hard drive was able to calibrate without any modification to the firmware. We did have to tell our utility to read only with head numbers one and two; this worked without a problem. In the end we only had about 24 bad sectors.
After the initial operation we proceeded to re-install the second (damaged) platter; which had been replaced with the donor platter. This time we limited the utility to use head number 3 and read only the third surface. We heard some occasional knocking coming from the drive, but it was read with success.
Next came the final step: reading the data from the fourth platter in spite of the damage to it. The key element to successful retrieval in this instance was to minimize the reading done to the drive. We requested our utility to create a map of all folders and files; if one particular file fell within the damaged area we would skip it in order to prevent damage to the heads or to the platters.
At the end of this step we were able to recover more than 98% of the total data stored to this hard drive, leading to recovery of about 34,000 picture, video and document files. The customer was extremely happy; he was convinced that the data would never be recoverable. Thankfully, it did not turn out that way.
Disclosure: this article is for reference only. The name of some tools and also some of the important steps are maintained confidential.
If the data is critical, send it to the experts www.emandatarecovery.com phone: (425) 347-3732.
Many thanks to our Partner, who recommended the customer to our shop.
We pay a 10% spiff to you for any recommendation of our service to any of your customers.
If you want to become a partner please visit our site and click on the Partner tab.
Copyright: E-man Data Recovery LLC
on Apr 27 2011 in Data Recovery tagged by Emanuel
E-man Data Recovery Seattle is offering a support service for Data Recovery Companies that have some unrecoverable cases that need to be recovered.
We had helped many data recovery companies in WA that were dealing with difficult cases that were diagnosed impossible to recover the data from and we ware able to recover the data and give the support needit
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on Mar 24 2011 in Data Recovery tagged by Emanuel
Today I want to highlight the benefits of the microscope as a necessary tool for any engineer recovering data from a damaged hard drive.
It seems strange that a lot of professionals who have been recovering data for a long time don’t have a microscope and don’t take advantage of this tool. It is as elementary as opening the hard drive only in a clean room environment and using the proper data recovery tools.
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on Mar 21 2011 in Viruses tagged by Emanuel
Computer-virus infections don’t cause your hard drive to crash anymore. Though we have seen same rare cases of data corruption and encryption due to same viruses .Nowadays, the criminals behind the infections usually want your computer operating in top form so you don’t know something’s wrong. That way, they can log your keystrokes and steal any passwords or credit-card numbers you enter at Web sites, or they can link your infected computer with others to send out spam.
Here are some signs your computer is infected, tapped to serve as part of “botnet” armies run by criminals:
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on Mar 21 2011 in Data Recovery tagged by Emanuel
Advanced data recovery on Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320820AS and Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3100524AS
One of the most frequent problems of modern hard drives is spindle engine shaft jamming. There are especially many Seagate hard discs, so popular in the United States that come to my lab for data recovery because of this failure.
This particular case is about a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320820AS 320 GB SATA drive from which the customer needed only a quick books database recovered, of about 97Mb in size.
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