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 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 […]
This week is another story about how “we make data recovery affordable”. In this case we received a Western Digital 750GB desktop model WD7500AAKS-00RBA0. The HDD had already been to Secure Data Recovery lab and quoted $1964. When the customer mentioned our prices the other recovery company told them nobody could recover their HDD for […]
At Blizzard DR we use many different hardware tools and software so we can recover data from most USB flash drives. The first tool in our flash recovery toolbox is the stereo microscope. Under the scope we can determine if any components are missing or physically damaged. We also look for signs of previous attempts […]
In the past I have used some of the cheaper head removal tools with success but once you use precision tools long enough you start to really notice the difference in quality and performance. Over the past couple of years we have been replacing our cheaper HDD head stack removal tools with the finest tools […]
This week we had a few cases I would like to share. For USB flash recovery we had a 64GB Lexar with 2 NAND chips. The device had already been sent to another lab but the price was quoted so high the customer requested that the DR shop send it back. After calling to confirm […]
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 […]
This past week in the data recovery lab we repaired an average number of USB flash drives. Some examples include a 4GB Sandisk, 16GB Lexar, and 16GB Emtec but the main one I want to talk about was an Ativa 8GB device. The NAND chip on this Ativa brand flash device is a model that’s […]