Data Recovery

The customer checked in a Seagate Barracuda 5TB drive that was dropped in water. The customer put the drive in rice for a long time. Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem. Here is an example of what the liquid did to the drive (heavy corrosion). The next step is to open the drive in our clean room to make sure there is no liquid inside.

Just wanted to share one of the cases from last week. Customer check in a Western Digital My Passport 4TB that was opened by them, not in a clean room. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture??

Checked in a Seagate (ST2000LM003) 2TB 2.5" drive for data recovery. The drive has mechanical issues so we had to open the drive in our clean room. We wanted to show everyone what the sliders look like in this model. We had a compatible donor in our library and we are recovering the customer's data.

The customer was a referral from a computer repair shop that tried to recover the drive and was unsuccessful. The drive failed and wasn't being recognized by the customer's computer. We powered on the drive and it is making some very ugly mechanical sounds. We opened the drive cover in our Clean Room and the top visible platter has a pretty bad scratch on the out lip of the drive. Since the drive is fairly old, we do need to source a donor part.

Here is a look at a USB Chip that isn't getting any power. The process to attempt recovery for this type of issue is called "Chip Off Recovery". For this, we use our tool called the "Spider Board".

Customer checked in a Western Digital My Passport 4TB that was dropped on the carpet. The drive was making clicking sounds and unfortunately, the drive was powered on for a while. We opened up the drive in our clean room and this is what we discovered. Unfortunately, the drive had severe contamination.

Checked in a Lacie 4TB External Drive. The customer was using the drive and it unmounted itself from the computer. After that happened, the customer connected the drive and it made like clicking/ticking sounds and spun down. We will attempt to recover the data from the drive. We opened the drive in our clean room and we also removed the read/write heads from the drive and inspected them under the microscope. We only had very light contamination on the top read/write head :).

Checked in a 3.5" WD (WD5000AAKX) Internal drive from a Windows PC. The computer most probably had a power outage or was using the wrong power adapter. The drive gets absolutely no power.

Customer checked in an Internal Desktop Drive that isn't powering on. The customer saw smoke coming out of the desktop. Look at the back of the PCB Board and can you see the damage? CRAZY!!!

Wanted to share with our followers what Bad Heads look like. When a drive takes a drop, is banged, or is improperly ejected, most likely it's going to have a mechanical issue. Here is an example of what a drive looks like internally with bad heads.

Customer checked in a Western Digital 3TB drive that was losing connection. We powered on the drive and it is making VERY unusual sounds. I am 90% sure the issue with the drive is mechanical and very serious. We opened up the drive cover and this is what we saw. We have seen thousands of drives and this part that's in here is not a part of the drive. The drive cover was opened by someone else and we had no idea. Please understand that we are doctors for hard drives.

Checked in a job for a 4 drive RAID that failed and the RAID is set up for a Microsoft server. After we diagnosed the drives, we found out that drive 2 was failing due to serious bad sectors. We are imaging the drives and are working on rebuilding the RAID after. We will see how this recovery turns out.

Customer mailed us their drive that was constantly clicking. As you can see, there is serious platter damage. How can this happen???? The only way that this can happen is torturing the drive. Once the drive is powered on and you hear a clicking sound, power down the drive and take it to a Data Recovery Specialist.

Data Recovery for a Western Digital My Passport 3TB which is beeping. * Take a look at the heads, and let us know what our chances of recovery are. *

Checked in 2 hard drives that had mechanical issues. One hard drive was powered on for a couple minutes with it clicking. The other drive, the customer didn't know it was clicking. We will diagnose the damage to the drives and see if we can recover the customers data.

Checked in a Western Digital My Passport 4TB drive that is making a single clicking sound every 1 -2 minutes. Clicking most of the time indicates a mechanical issue. Always safely power down the drive and take it to a Data Recovery Specialist.