I received a 160gb Fujitsu hard drive from a client which had a damaged PCB , it later turned out that the drive was from an early macbook which had been dropped in salt water while it was still running. When I first received the drive it was not clear exactly what computer the drive originated from.
The first job was to find replacement electronics that closely matched the original drive and you could not simply go on the PCB number. For the best chance of a successful PCB swap with fujitsu drives it was necessary to match as closely as possible the following;
FUJITSU MHW2160BH PL
PCB ca26343 b84304ba
PART No CA06820-B39800AP
Fw 07FEBC-0081001C
I was fortunate to find an exact match for the PCB and obtain a complete drive from San Diego , see picture below , this then could enable a possible head swap if necessary for data recovery
s. Now that we had a perfect match, we were ready to perform a delicate operation – moving the ROM chip from the water-damaged patient to our working PCB. To our surprise, the original 160GB drive was showing a gargantuan size of 2TB after swapping the ROM chip. However, we remained determined to retrieve the data and embarked on imaging the drive. It didn’t take long to discover that this drive had originated from a Mac computer. Unfortunately, the HFS file system was severely corrupted, a common occurrence in such cases. Despite our efforts using both the Mac Disk Utility and the Mac Disk Warrior utility, the file system proved irreparable. The user’s account folder was gone without a trace. It was now clear that we had to resort to a raw data recovery method. This technique involves bypassing the drive’s file system, in this instance, HFS, and scanning the drive sector by sector, searching for file signatures of various formats, such as jpegs, word docs, mp3s, and more. For this task, I relied on the exceptional capabilities of both R-Studio and Active File Recovery Professional, as I found the latter to excel in this particular scenario. Running these programs meticulously, we successfully recovered a vast range of photos, documents, music, and videos that were salvageable. During our interaction with the client, he expressed a strong desire to retrieve numerous videos captured by his camera. He even managed to recall a specific one featuring a plane flying over the boat he was in. And as you can witness in the remarkable picture below, our relentless efforts yielded the desired outcome.Strangely enough, I didn’t have to resort to expensive products in my search for the missing videos. Surprisingly, they were recorded in an early Quicktime video format called mdat, which is not commonly used for distribution purposes anymore. But guess what? The solution to my predicament came in the form of a FREE TOOL called Photorec. Don’t let its price fool you, because Photorec has the ability to find a wider range of picture and video formats than any professional tool out there. It’s truly remarkable! Photorec is a powerful digital photo recovery tool that can retrieve lost photos, videos, and even documents. Whether your precious memories were accidentally deleted or destroyed due to a virus or system crash, Photorec comes to the rescue. What’s even better is that it’s not limited to your computer system alone. You can recover photos and pictures from various sources like cell phones, tablets, memory cards, digital cameras, SLRs, external hard drives, and more. It’s a versatile program that caters to the needs of both professionals and amateurs alike. Even if you’re not tech-savvy, you can effortlessly use Photorec to retrieve your valuable files. No need for any expertise in software or computer systems. Are you curious to learn more about our Data Recovery Services? Don’t hesitate to reach out!
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