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.
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 […]
At Blizzard we continue to prove that we can save customers some serious money. This past week we received two Seagate ST2000DM001 hard drives from a QNAP NAS box. The drives were configured RAID-1 which means they were a mirrored pair. When working properly both drives are a mirror image of each other so they […]
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 […]