Data Recovery from Western Digital Hard Disk Drives
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Update: 02 October 2009 MjM Data Recovery have now developed techniques for recovering data from Western Digital Laptop hard disks that have processor failure. Because these hard disks use 'embedded' ROM (the ROM contents are stored inside the processor) - the problem was copying the ROM to a working board. If the processor had failed, then so too has the ROM. MjM Data Recovery have developed a process where we have can modify a circuit board to enable transfer of ROM to an external ROM chip and to get the drive to boot from modified ROM. We are then able to read the original ROM content from the System Area of the drive and recreate it resulting with recovered data. |
We are now working on a solution to 3.5" drives with the same problem.
Western Digital Data Recovery.
Western Digital are one of the most common drives and are generally quiet and reliable, however we have seen a small percentage of these drives failing due to system area corruption that we have managed to recreate in our labs. We believe that this is not a manufacturing problem. We have developed in-house software tools and techniques to recover data from all Western Digital drives with this and other system area, electronic and mechanical problems. Our overall data recovery rate for Western Digital drives is better than 90%
We can carry out data recovery from all models of Western Digital hard drives including ATA drives, SATA drives, SCSI drives, Laptop and external hard disks.
Symptoms of Western Digital Firmware failure
The symptoms are that the drive is recognised ok by the computer, but nothing can be read.
During our research we found that there were usually between 1 to 6 firmware modules affected. These were mainly the SMART logs and the translator tables used by the drive to track bad sectors. When problems arise in these areas, the drive will partly initialise, but may up to 60 seconds before the drive shows in BIOS. Because the translator is not loaded correctly, the drive will not finish initialising and nothing can be read or written to the drive.