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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
On modern Western Digital hard drives it is not usually difficult to find a compatible donor for a head swap case. Use the following information at your own expense/risk. Typically you try to match the full model number (e.g. WD20EARX-22PASB0), the TJ, VJ, T2, V2 in the DCM code, and get a close date. The […]
We recently had a case where a 4.0TB Western Digital hard drive had been dropped. When a hard drive is dropped, the read/write heads are typically damaged and need to be replaced. In the best cases, there is no platter damage, but on average there is some damage, even if it’s just to the edge […]
The following is information we have gathered to help find compatible hard drives for Seagate head swap data recovery cases. None of this information is guaranteed to help you find a matching Seagate donor drive. This is just information that we have gathered from other resources and then refined from our own experience. Use at […]
Even if you have opened your hard drive we might still be able to recover your data. If you experienced a hard drive failure and started searching for solutions like: How do I fix a failed hard drive? How to recover lost photos Dead hard disk drive repair Can I fix my own HDD? How […]
With the launch of our new website I look forward to providing a look into the daily operations at our data recovery lab. I will add some recovery examples and information that might help others understand the data recovery process, pitfalls, and tricks. Hopefully sharing some of my experiences will help others successfully recover data […]