Specific Hard Drive Data Recovery Problems
MjM Data Recovery Ltd always strive to keep up with new trends in storage technology and data recovery technology. Over the years, we have developed specialist knowledge and techniques for data recovery from storage devices that have failed for one reason or another. Generally, what we find is there are three factors in a failure.
- Common issues. Such as head crash, bad sectors, electronic failures, deleted data, etc.
- Specific issues. These are problems that arise with specific manufacturers, a specific hard disk model number, or an entire range of drives from a specific series.
- Natural and man made Disasters. Floods, Fires, Earthquakes, electrical storms, terrorist activity, etc.
When we find a problem with media that falls into the second category, we get to work on researching exactly what happens. We do this by buying in scrap hard disks, sorting those that have similar problems and use them for research and development. Once the research is complete, we develop safe techniques to recover the data from the media. Over the years we have often led the way for data recovery in a number of areas, most notably those listed below. It should be noted that whilst some problems do exist, they only affect a tiny fraction of the total number of hard drives, manufacturers listen to data recovery companies and customers' storage problems to help them improve the quality of their products. Considering there are literally billions of hard disks in the world, the failure rate is very low. However, sometimes issues arise in the field that can cause problems for users, and they come to us for help and advice. Some of the problems are listed below.
Quantum Fireball Problems
An interesting choice of name, because it was alleged that an american business went up in flames when one of these drives failed. The problem was quickly sourced to one of the components on the controller card that had failed. In 2000 - 2002 we saw several hundred of these drives with burnt out chips caused by a failure in another component. We repaired these drives by replacing the burnt out components.
Fujitsu Firmware Problems
We discovered this problem in 2001 when we noticed an exceptionally high number of failures. Our research found that the problem was due to a bad batch of compound used during the manufacture of the processor. Within a very short time we found a solution and to date have recovered over 1,000 drives suffering with the problem. More information about this problem can be found by following this link. Fujitsu Data Recovery
Western Digital SMART issues
Just after the Fujitsu problem was starting to wane, another issue arose, but this time with Western Digital drives. Considering that WDC is one of the largest hard disk manufacturers in the World, the problem affected only a tiny proportion of the drives manufactured. What we found was the SMART logs became corrupt which had a run-on affect which stopped the translator mechanism working on these drives. We found a method of, repairing the SMART logs and rebuilding the translator using our advanced 'data recovery discovery engineering' methods. More details about our WDC data recovery can be found here Data recovery from western digital hard disks
Maxtor Slimline
This was a range of drives that contained a single platter and under-platter mounted head stack. Some of these drives suffered a similar problem to that of WDC drive (above), typically SMART logs and defect maps becoming corrupt. Full details of our Maxtor data recovery service can be found here. Maxtor data recovery services
Seagate SCSI Hard Disks
Another firmware problem rose it's head. Because fewer SCSI drives are sold, the problems were difficult to spot at first, but we soon realised that the problem was in the translator of the drives. We developed software to repair these drives and recover them for data recovery companies throughout the world. Full details can be found here Seagate SCSI Hard Disks
Toshiba
A small proportion of these drives we have found to suffer from motor problems, either noisy or the motor completely seizes. We have developed advanced platter and motor removal equipment and regularly recover data from hard disks with this type of problem.
Other Manufacturers
We are able to recover data from all manufacturers including ...
- Compaq
- Connor
- DEC
- Dell
- Digital
- Freecom
- Fujitsu
- Hewlett Packard
- Hitachi
- IBM
- JTS
- Lacie
- Magnetic Data Technologies
- Maxtor
- Micropolis
- Miniscribe
- NEC
- Nikimi
- Quantum
- Samsung
- Seagate
- Toshiba
- Western Digital
- All manufacturers of external USB and SCSI drives
Other Specialist Services
We have also developed many other Specialist Services techniques. One of the more recent ones is recovering data from dead memory cards, if other data recovery companies have told you there is nothing that can be done. Send it to us and we will remove the physical memory chips and see if we can recover the data directly. For more information about our advanced memory recovery service, please follow this link Advanced memory Card Recovery . We get memory cards from all over the world, so we know we are a leader in this new field of data recovery.
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