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 the heads had bounced around the platters for more than a few seconds while they were spinning, it was not too much to attempt a recovery. We notified the customer that it could take some time, but a lot of data was recoverable, we then proceeded with a head swap and the recovery. Forty days later, yes forty days, the recovery was complete and the results were very good. We had complete file and folder information and more than 70% of the customer’s data was clean. The remaining data had bad sectors, but was mostly viewable with some defects. In the end, the customer was satisfied and very happy to get that long lost data back. This is just another example of a very close call, backup your data because not every hard drive is recoverable.
Case #2 was a Seagate ST3640330AS 640GB desktop hard drive. This drive had started developing bad sectors and suffered some firmware damage. Using the PC-3000 and Data Extractor from Ace Laboratory we could start the drive with a loader, disable power cycles, and recover 100% of the clients data. Although that might not sound too difficult, this case probably took about 48 hours of non-stop sector reading using different read settings. No, we don’t sleep at Blizzard Data Recovery 🙂
Case #3 was a notorious Seagate ST1000DM003 1TB desktop model. This HDD had bad heads and some damage to the service area where the firmware resides. Initially this one looked like it might be pretty easy after the head swap but it wasn’t long before the HDD stopped working again. It took some time but we managed to rebuild the damaged service area, initialize the HDD and keep it running long enough to get a full recovery, this was a close one.
