• Dropped Laptop Data Recovery

    by Oct 04, 2018

    At Blizzard Data Recovery we see a lot of 2.5″ laptop hard drives where the laptop suffered a fall or impact. Tip: don’t get mad at the internet and throw your laptop or bang on the keyboard 🙂 In some cases the laptop fails to boot and it ends up going to a computer repair […]

  • USB Flash Device Connector Pinout

    by Oct 02, 2018

    It’s not uncommon to see a USB flash device (UFD) with a broken connector. In many cases, the the micro traces get torn, so just replacing the connector won’t be enough to repair the device. If you are sure you just need to replace the connector, here are the common pinouts for wiring the USB […]

  • Seagate ST1000LM035 – ST2000LM007 – ST1000LM048

    by Sep 24, 2018

    Recovery cases for Seagate mobile drives (Rosewood Disk Drive Family) have increased considerably in the past 8 months. When these hard drives first came out we saw a number of them that were unrecoverable because the platter surfaces were destroyed. This year the successful recovery ratio has become more in line with other brands and […]

  • DIY Data Recovery Failure

    by Sep 09, 2018

    DIY data recovery cases have always trickled in to our lab, but recently there has been an upward trend for opened hard disk drives. Most of the time the data owner has opened the device because a YouTuber told them they could get their data back. Unfortunately, there were no details in the video about […]

  • How To Repair a USB Flash Drive

    by Jun 10, 2018

    Can a USB flash drive be repaired or recovered? In most cases, YES! How do we repair a broken USB thumb drive? Take note, the data recovery method can be quite different if the flash media has just stopped working. In some cases, the metal USB connector might come loose or break off. Assuming no […]

  • Rosewood ST1000LM035 3 Heads

    by May 13, 2018

    This week we had a Seagate ST1000LM035 with numerous media defects. We suspected that the HDD had been dropped like many mobile drives from this Seagate family. We opened the device in one of our clean bench workstations and immediately noticed something different, three heads! In the past these 1TB drives were typically a single […]

  • Proper Disk Drive Packing and DIY Failure

    by Mar 28, 2018

    Proper Hard Drive Packing This week I would like to talk about proper handling and shipping for hard drives. The unknown often works against people because they really need/want their data recovered but they compound the problem because they just don’t understand how delicate a conventional hard disk drive is. Once you realize the close […]

  • Week 2017-1119 In The Lab

    by Nov 28, 2017

    This week we had an older Intel solid state drive (SSD) with a problem that was discovered a number of years ago. The problem is listed as the “Bad Context 13x Error”,  but is more commonly known as the “8MB bug”. The user loses access to all data and the device reports S/N: BAD_CTX. Intel […]

  • Week 2017-1022 in the Lab

    by Oct 30, 2017

    You may have noticed that I don’t share specifics for a lot of flash recovery cases. Although we recover numerous flash drives every week, many of the USB recoveries involve bent/broken connectors or the pads have been torn or ripped off the PCB. In those cases we replace the connector or reconstruct the path with […]

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