Technical advice for data recovery, tips for data preservation, and general wisdom from a team who has been recovering data and working on computers and other electronic hardware for decades.
On modern Western Digital hard drives it is not usually difficult to find a compatible WD donor for parts in 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 […]
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 broken 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 […]
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) […]