• 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 2018-0304 in the Lab

    by Mar 18, 2018

    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 […]

  • Week 2018-0218 in the Lab

    by Feb 25, 2018

    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 […]

  • Week 2018-0204 in the Lab

    by Feb 18, 2018

    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 […]

  • Week 2018-0128 in the Lab

    by Feb 11, 2018

    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 […]

  • Week 2018-0114 in the Lab

    by Jan 30, 2018

    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 […]

  • 2017 in Review – Data Recovery Lab

    by Dec 31, 2017

    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 […]

  • 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 2017-1105 In The Lab

    by Nov 11, 2017

    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. In 2016 these Rosewood family disk drives were notorious for catastrophic failures. Some refer to them as having “soft” platters but it could just be […]

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