The Case of the Failed RAID
The Problem It is not often that I am asked to go on site to perform a recovery. But in this case a large mining and exploration company had suffered a power outage and one of their HP dedicated servers was now not booting and they wanted me to come in and recover data in […]
The Case of the missing Chief Architect Plan
A client came to me with a failing 1 terabyte seagate hard drive and he desparately needed his Chief Architect files to be recovered. Chief Architect is a 3D design tool primarily for the design of houses which my client now did in his retirement , interestingly before he had decided to design homes he […]
Dolphin Data Labs Firmware Repair Tool
Here at Data Recovery Perth we have been using DFL Firmware Repair tools for approx 2 years now and I have found this tool essential in the repair of hard drive firmware and data recovery in general for Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung and Hitachi drives. My goal in this discussion is to give an overview […]
The Case of the missing Tractor GPS data
I recently received a call from a distressed farmer who had driven 4 hours from Southern Cross because his GPS device attached to his tractor had received a power surge and would no longer boot up. These devices are used by farmers to track where chemicals have been sprayed or seeded in specific paddocks, so […]
Swapping ROMs when a Hard Drive PCB is replaced
Diagnosis of a damaged PCB One of the first steps in Data Recovery is assessing the health of the electronics of a hard drive and a replacement of the PCB should occur if The PCB appears damaged If the hard drive does not spin up then it is usually due to a damaged PCB […]
Data Recovery Tools for only Ten Dollars
I use data recovery tools from Salvation Data which are specifically designed for Western Digital and Seagate hard drives and they are essential in my daily work when assessing the health of a hard drive. These tools allow you to do the following tasks; Diagnose the health of the drives electronics Diagnose the health of […]
Firmware Corruption – Seagate 7200.14
It is quite common to encounter firmware corruption on Seagate Hard Drives of all their models but the latest Seagate drives the 7200.14 have added a new twist. The Seagate 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives had the familiar busy error where the drive does not show up in you computer’s BIOS although the drive spins up […]
Data Recovery – File Systems FAT32
File Systems File systems describe the records and indexes that an Operating System (Windows , Linux) use to retrieve and store data on the hard drive. Before we talk about the simplest filesystem FAT it is important to note all windows based hard drives contain 2 crucial areas on the Hard drive the Master Boot […]
Data Recovery – The System Area
OK we have got our hard drive with all it’s parts working properly what else can go wrong? Well as explained previously the data is contained on the magnetic surface of the drive and this surface can fail. In addition the data written to it can be corrupted and this may occur from power failure Before we even […]
Data Recovery – What is it?
A frequent response I receive from customers when I try explain the Data Recovery process is “I don’t care about the Hard Drive I just want the data back”. Unfortunately much of the time the reason for the data loss is damage to the hard drive and that the only way of retrieving the data is […]