WD30NPRZ Data Recovery | Case Study #18

In this case study, we’ll be performing a WD30NPRZ data recovery project that came into our laboratory for hard drive recovery.

• Hard Drive Model: WD30NPRZ-82YRMT0
• Hard Drive Family: PebbleB
• External Enclosure: G-Drive Mobile USB GDRU3NA30001ABB
• PCB: 2060-800022-000 REV P2
• Symptoms: Customer describes that drive was taking a long time to appear when connected it.  They tried to copy data off, but it disconnected before they were able to finish copying the data.  When they tried subsequent times to connect the drive it would spin up normally, make no clicking sounds, but never mount to the system.

Hard Drive Evaluation

Hard drive is connected to PC-3000 and powered on.  Listen test is performed and drive sounds to start up normally.  Status indicators show that the drive quickly comes to a ready state, however gets stuck busy as soon as it’s identification is read by the system.  Subsequent attempts have the same result.

PCB is removed and inspected, all appears normal.  Preamplifier is blocked to prevent service area accessing on next startup.  Next, the drive is powered on and ROM code is read and analyzed.  The ROM revision is determined to be 0002000U.  A matching copy of this firmware version is obtained from another data recovery laboratory.  ROM is modified to prevent service area accessing, and the physical block of the preamp is removed.  This model is not fully supported yet in PC-3000 however a similar utility is able to execute all the necessary functions.

Backup of service area modules is performed and modules are analyzed.  The drive appears that it may have an issue with modules 02 and 32 which relate to it’s bad sector auto-allocation functions.  Read/write heads are tested and all pass test.  Hard drive is determined to fall into our Tier 1 pricing ($450 up to 2TB).

Data Recovery of WD30NPRZ

After approval is given by customer to proceed, hard drive is reconnected to PC-3000 and firmware is repaired.  This is done to clear the previously re-allocated sectors which was the result of a malfunction.  Also the function is disabled so as to prevent further corruption of the modules.  ROM is again modified to allow service area access and the firmware is restarted.  Drive is now able to read identification and sector access is fully restored.

Task is created in Data Extractor software to extract the needed files.  Headmap is generated to determine if any heads are weak or slow reading.  Headmap is determined to be 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (10 heads in total), as this is a 5 platter 2.5″ hard drive.  All heads appear to read normally during imaging.  Head #8 hits a few areas of bad sectors early on, but seems to read normally after a few million sectors.  This is likely the original trigger of the malfunction.

The most critical folders requested by the customer are targeted and a sector map created to image these (168Gb of data).  Afterward a map is created to target all data based on the HFS+ bitmap file.  Drive is imaged successfully with over 99.999% of sectors read.

Total Cost of Recovery: $500 ($450 for hardware Tier 1 + $50 since it’s over 2Tb)

If you have a similar WD30NPRZ data recovery case for us, please contact us for a free evaluation.