Technical advice for data recovery, tips for data preservation, and general wisdom from someone who has been recovering data and working on computers and other electronic hardware for decades.
This week we had a common case that was a typical result of a DIY recovery. The case was a Seagate 1TB external hard drive that stopped working. When disk drive media starts deteriorating bad sectors start accumulating until they reach a level that causes failure. At a certain point the drive’s firmware design can’t […]
This week we had a non-typical 128GB USB flash drive. At first glance the case looks like a standard broken connector repair. Typically you remove the bent or broken connector and replace it with a new USB 3.0 connector. WAIT! Not so fast. Look closer, this Phison based 128GB USB device has a non-standard USB […]
This week we had two cases that could have ended in no recovery but the customers were lucky. If you ship a flash drive it is very important that you do not send it in a regular envelope. A box is preferred but at least use a padded envelope and always use a service that […]
This week’s special cases were very close to the customer not getting any data. Data recovery should not be your backup plan! Case #1 Western Digital WD10JMVW 1TB laptop hard drive that had already been to another data recovery lab. The diagnoses was “too much media damage”. While there was considerable media damage as if […]
This week we had a 250GB Western Digital model WD2500AAKX that was dropped. As you can see in the photo the heads were mangled and still on the platter. What you can’t see is that it fell so hard the orange head ramp is actually broken and that’s why the heads could not return to […]
It’s been a great year for us at Blizzard Data Recovery. Our hard drive recovery business continues to grow and we have purchased a number of new tools this year to keep up with that growth. Because of this growth we have tripled the number of HDD cases we can work on at the same […]
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 […]
As time allows I like to share some of the less common recovery cases that we encounter. This week we had a visit from a Seagate ST2000LM007 mobile hard drive. These Rosewood family disk drives are notorious for catastrophic failures. Some speculate that they have “soft” platters but it could just be that we are […]
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 […]