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.
Here is a random look at some data recovery cases from the week of July 30th 2017. At Blizzard we always try to perform a temporary repair on USB flash devices before we resort to chip-off recovery. We replace the connectors, check under a microscope for cracked solder joints, lifted TSOP48 pins, blown littelfuse or […]
Some new t̶o̶y̶s̶ tools have arrived! We added the Seagate 3.5″ head tools to our existing tool set but we also got our hands on two new offerings from HDD Surgery. With the arrival of the Western Digital 2.5″ and the Seagate 2.5″ slim models some new challenges also arrived. How do we swap heads […]
This week we upgraded one of our original data recovery tools. Hardware based recovery tools make a big difference in DR work, many times it’s the difference between recovering data and failure. The tools aren’t cheap which is one reason there isn’t a DR shop on every corner. They also require training, experience, and updates […]
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 […]
This is an example of a recent recovery we did at Blizzard Data Recovery. In this case the USB flash drive had been broken in half. Some cases are just a matter of replacing the broken connector, testing for shorts or open circuits, and then recovering the data. Although that doesn’t sound too difficult we […]
We recently added to our long list of HDD repair tools and were pleasantly surprised at the quality and value of these new tools. The platter removal tools and platter stand from HDD Head Tools (DFL) support both 2.5″ and 3.5″ hard drives. The platter removal tools (1 x 2.5″ and 1 x 3.5″ tool) […]
We continue proving to new customers that we are more than competitive, “we make data recovery affordable”. This past month we received cases for hard disk drives that had already been quoted by Drive Savers and Secure Data Recovery. Here are two examples. Case number 1 was a Western Digital SATA drive model WD5000AAKS. The […]
This post might be helpful if you are thinking about starting your own USB Flash Device or hard disk drive data recovery lab, but the primary reason for writing it is to let our customers see why the business is different than computer repair and support. We also get questions about the the cost of […]
This week’s special case was a 2007 PATA HDD. This Samsung SP2514N was in an external enclosure and got knocked over. Since the drive was identified as dropped and “previously opened” we first opened it in one of our laminar airflow workstations. Upon inspection we noticed a stiction mark on the top platter but the […]