Search results

I'm still unable to determine how new users are bypassing the moderation of the first 5 posts. The only possibility I can think of is that one of the moderator accounts was compromised, possibly due to a recycled password. To be sure, I've removed all moderator permissions 100% from the forum...

Sorry for all the spam. Somehow these suckers found a way to bypass the moderation of their first 5 posts and get them to directly post. I'm still now sure how they're doing it, perhaps a flaw in the forum software (I haven't updated it in a couple versions). They were posting faster than I...

Hey guys, I just finished migrating the forum to a new virtual server. Trying to cut some hosting costs, so combining up several of my sites into a single VPS. Please let me know here if you are experiencing any sort of new issues with the forum. I've got some new things running, like...

So I've just finished developing a tool that allows to input a hex value from the same location on each disk of a RAID 50 set, and it'll figure out the two RAID 5 sets by analyzing the XOR. It can work for any size, no matter how many drives. Here's a screenshot: Shown with 80 input boxes...

So, I've been clearing some old drives which had bad sectors to just sanitize them. A command I've often used to clear drives with bad sectors is: T>m0,4,2,,,0,0,22 Which I started using (with good results) after seeing it used in MRT's menu for drive refurbishing. Normally, when I've done...

Well, if you've been holding off getting the portable system to handle NVMe SSDs, looks like it'll be time to buy one in 2 years. Seagate is planning to start shipping this junk in 2024: Fun stuff. The connection looks pretty SAS to me, and it sounds like maybe it'll support SATA/SAS & NVMe...

Okay, been a few bugs to sort out, but I think we're now done with the migration from phpBB to the new and improved Xenforo. Please let me know if any resources seem to be missing. A few old URLs may not resolve, but we've done our best to get as much as possible ported from one platform to...

This had me scratching my head today. Plugged in a brand new 4Tb Toshiba Canvio HDD that I bought on Amazon as a destination for a case. I happened to open up WD Discovery software, to reset encryption on another drive that I had sold on eBay & previous owner hadn't sanitized. Was quite...

No need to panic, there hasn't been any data breach here just yet. In the coming weeks, I'll be migrating this forum away from phpBB to a new platform entirely. Switching it to Xenforo if you are curious. Due to the switch, I'll be employing the help of a third party that'll be migrating all...

So here's a case that had me baffled for a good hour or so before I finally figured out what was going on. Hope you'll get a good laugh out of it too. Case is a WD2500BEVT-22ZCT0 drive described as clicking. Drive has head map of 0 2 3 (physically missing head 1). When I open it up in the...

So, I wrote a blog post here that is one of the biggest head-scratchers I've ever seen: https://www.data-medics.com/data-recove ... very-case/ The case is solved and all data recovered, but I still have no real clue what could have led to this situation.

Here are the settings found for my recent Adaptec AIC-9410W RAID 6, for future reference: Turns out it was Q before P but gave me quite a runaround having 8 drives and needing to figure out which three were the current ones.

So this was interesting. I always thought Best Buy was sending their customer's drives out to Kroll or someone like that. But this week I get a client who had their drive sent to Arizona by the local Best Buy for recovery (allegedly under their own service). So he pays $500 and gets back only...

Good deal on brand new Toshiba NAS drives today: https://www.mojosavings.com/20-off-deal ... ve-163-99/

Maybe, it depends on the phone model and version of Andriod that it runs. Most decent phones now have full disk encryption enabled, and a factory reset will generate a new random key. So in most cases, it's a dead end.

Seeing this doesn't bode well for the future of good old spinners: https://www.techradar.com/news/this-8tb ... mal-laptop I know the price is still prohibitive now, but if in 5 years the new SSDs are in the 20Tb ranges, I suspect it'll be the end of the HDD gravy train.

Over the next 24-48 hours, you may start to notice some advertisements being posted on this forum. I'm running a trial for the next month or so to just test how much advertising revenue a forum like this could generate (given that data recovery keywords are expensive in Google). I don't plan...

Hey guys, I'm considering putting Google Adsense on the forum for just a month or so. I'm not planning to keep it there, at least not so long as I'm in business. I'm just curious about what it could earn in the future when I someday retire from doing this work. You think it'll be overly...

Anyone seeing any significant changes to business as usual in the data recovery sector? (E.G. severe slowdowns in new cases) So far it seems to be pretty normal here, but there are still only a few confirmed cases locally too. I'm curious how it's affecting you guys over in Italy, China...

Are you guys getting a sudden surge in PM spam on this forum? I know Larry flagged a couple of messages and Luke mentioned receiving a few too. I'm thinking we may need to disable PMs for newly registered users now.

Seems Dolphin is claiming they now know how to do hot swap with Seagate: https://www.dolphindatalab.com/seagate-f3-hdd-hot-swap/ I'm curious to see if it turns out to be true.

Well guys, it looks like we're almost there: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/02 ... 020/?amp=1 Seagates with HAMR laser technology coming to retail this year. All I keep thinking is this: Well, not sharks or even angry seabass, but perhaps some Barracudas with lasers attached to their...

Anyone ever seen a terminal log like this on a Rosewood before? LrgShock interrupting a servo error LargeShock @ 0E8F9E03 LrgShock happens before seek LargeShock @ 0E8F9E03 FAIL Servo Op=0095 Resp=0007 I'm the second lab looking at it, and I'm guessing the first guys gave up on it. After...

Hey guys, I'm starting this thread to keep track of the aerial density of different families of WD Marvel drives. I think this might turn out to be useful for determining families that might be cross-compatible for heads. Feel free to post below any additional families or if you know of other...

What are you guys using as your criteria for matching heads donors for Spyglass family drives? I notice that the vast majority of the USB ones pulled from externals don't have a DCM printed on them. I see that Donor Drives is starting to list the first four digits of the serial. Is that what...

So this just happened: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/09 ... each-cell/ PLC NAND (Penta Layer Cell) NAND memory which will now likely enable a single NAND chip of +1Tb size. Likely will be slow, but with a decent sized SLC cache, they could soon be producing +8Tb consumer SSDs with only...

Does anyone have any info on this controller? Especially the pinout? It's one of those blob type NANDs, so I can't exactly do it the normal chip-off method.

So this seems to be a new phenomenon since I updated Windows this afternoon. We all know it's not uncommon for data recovery software to eat up a monster amount of RAM building virtual filesystems. In the past, the computer would just get really slow if the RAM got maxed out, but you could...

I'm starting this sticky thread to start tracking what part number drives come in what part number external enclosures. Could be handy later for matching drives that are pulled from externals for donors. External P/N -----> Internal P/N & Model 1KBAPA-500 -----> 1NA17Z-568 (ST8000AS0002)...

Does anyone know if heads are compatible between Julius1 and Sapta15 families? They seem nearly identical to me, I think that it's just that one is SED and the other isn't. I even notice that in the ROM of the patient I'm currently trying to identify (because the label is missing) the CAP...

So I see that Dolphin has an unlocked PCB for the challenger family PCBs that are SED locked by the PCB itself. (specifically board 2060-800067). Has anyone confirmed if it's safe to modify the SA on this family (assuming I buy the $500 PCB)? I know you can't really touch Palmer family SA...

So I just noticed this post on Ace forum: https://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtop ... 35&t=10066 Looks like they're running some sort of challenge to win a 25% discount on an Express system. Does anyone know what the challenge is?

This picture strikes fear into me: Some Japanese company, Hoya, is pitching 0.5mm thick glass platters to HDD companies. I can just imagine the fallout when Seagate adopts this and we end up with piles of drives coming described as "it sounds like a crunchy broken glass sound inside". :?

Here's an interesting read for y'all: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics ... ng-devices Without even having a microphone HDDs can be firmware tweaked to work as an audio recording device. I'd love to get my hands on that custom firmware.

Looks like WD Blue is moving into NVMe form factors now. Maybe a big player like WD getting serious in the SSD game will help to narrow the playing field. Perhaps one day there will be fewer companies who's SSDs need to be reverse engineered.

If anyone's looking for a little giggle this afternoon, watch this video to the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_K9AKEnEtk

So I'm not new to dealing with SED locked WD drives, but this one has me confounded. On arrival, the drive's PCB was totally dead. I had to physically remove the ROM and read it in an external programmer. With the ROM code programmed to a SATA board, the drive was then able to ID and had...

So I've got a rather odd case here that showed up. I've never seen anything quite like it. It's a microSD card from an Android device. Suddenly the pictures all seemed corrupted to the user. The card and filesystem all seem normal, but the opening signature of all the jpgs and video files on...

This sticky topic is to keep track of PCBs that have different part numbers but can still be used interchangeably. SATA - SATA (REV Likely Doesn't Matter) 100535537 REV C >>> 100536501 REV A 100687658 REV B >>> 100717520 REV B 100687658 REV C >>> 100717520 REV B 100532367 REV B >>>...

This sticky is for the purpose of keeping track of Toshiba SATA PCBs that are interchangeable despite having different part numbers. If you'd like to contribute any, please post below. For SATA PCBs to replace USB ones, please see this topic instead: toshiba-usb-to-sata-guide-t1305.html SATA...

Just in case any of you get one of these in, I've discovered that PC-3000 SSD can work with this series. Even though this one ends in -Y330, the S3C29MAX01-Y340 loader still works for it. I'm recovering one now using the -Y340 loader. Worked like a charm.

Has anyone ever come across a Promise RAID brand external RAID system that used parity delay? I'm dealing with one now that seems to have some unexplainable anomalies. It's clearly using a single sector stripe size, I've confirmed that several ways including by using entropy analysis (and...

So I'm starting this sticky to keep track of SATA PCBs that are cross-compatible with other SATA PCBs. Might come in handy when you get that rush job and it's the one PCB you don't have in your stock at the moment. 771959 & 771960 (confirmed) If you have others, please feel free to contribute...

Does anyone know if it's possible to rebuild a corrupt NVRAM on ARM series Hitachi drives (I've always assumed there isn't)? I've got a case here that's looking that way. I've tried writing the NVRAM to another PCB - no spin I've tried physically moving the entire ROM to a new PCB - no spin...

Yay, I get to make the 10,000th post today. Just want to say thanks to all of you who continue to use and contribute to this forum!!! :D

I'm trying to find a donor for the following drive: ST1000LM014 1EJ164-310 FW: SM36 SN: W7722... DOM: 07/2015 (date code: 16044) I actually only need it for a PCB donor since the NAND seems dead. However, every one I've tried so far was just far enough off that the PCB would reject the ROM...

So I've got a monolith here which I have the pinout for. PC-3000 recognizes the chip ID as: 0xAD3A1903 however it doesn't know the reading parameters for it. Does anyone have any experience with this chip or know the reading parameters for it?

So this is a terminal output I've never seen before. It's a Seagate SSHD model ST1000LM014: Boot 0x40M Trans. SOC PSM Mode = 0001 Atomic SOC PSM Command = 0000 Flash Read SOC PSM Status = 0011 Invalid PSM Parm Clump Parametrics: Clump = FE55...

Does anyone know the pinout for this thumbdrive? I've been told it's in the VNR database, but since my VNR reader failed and they're refusing to fix it I can't even open the program and access the database to check for it. Perhaps someone could PM it to me if you have it.. :P

So I've got a case here with a blown PCB and the ROM seems to be cooked. It reads correct ROM chip ID number when reading it through boot ROM code, but it's just filled with junk as you see here: I've tried reading it with another PCB, same thing. Tried on an external programmer and it won't...

So I'm just throwing this out there. I'm helping a guy remotely with a Seagate case. The drive get's ID after about 2-3 minutes of waiting. Seems that system file 28 and 35 are bad on head 0 so that explains the slow boot followed by ID. Problem is, every time it hits a bad sector it gets...

So this is more of a theoretical question since the drive is actually fine and I think the customer just needs to fix something else on the computer to get it back up for now. Does anyone have any experience working with Minix filesystem? The filesystem type marker in the partition table is...

Does anyone here know this monolith pinout?: It seems quite similar to #1, #4 and #5 in the Ace Monolith database, but something seems amiss. I know Arvika has it, but he's not really the sharing type.

So I stumbled across this picture this morning while looking into SSD externals (sometimes customers ask about these): It's a picture from inside of a WD My Passport SSD. Clearly, it's going from USB C to M.2 which could be really handy for times when we get M.2 SSDs from failed laptops for...

So today I finally got to try out my spider board on a real case. What a beautiful device, I must say. First try after setting all the pins up, PC-3000 Flash is dumping the NAND at 3Mb/s :D Perhaps I should start advertising this as a service now. Easier than I expected.

Has anyone ever seen this terminal error in a case where it wan't a non-original ROM code or PCB: SimError - Remaining in BootFW 00001002Perform a double download without a power cycle I've only ever seen this before when someone had messed around and had the wrong PCB on the drive. But, in...

So I've got this ST8000DM003 drive that's driving me crazy now. On first power up after swapping heads (donor was 100% perfect match in every way) the drive first ID'd and had sector access, but as soon as I tried to generate a headmap it got stuck busy. After power cycle this is what I get in...

So this is a terminal post I've never seen before: TILT DROP DELAY SEEK TILT DROP DELAY SEEK END SpinUpTime = 00000989 TTR1 = 00000A84 SIM Error 1002 LBA 000000000003B0A0 FD FCFFF3FF RW Error C4090085 I'm 95% sure it relates to weak/dirty/damaged heads. When I first powered it on it was...

So I've worked on a number of Seagate SSHDs, but most have all been the typical cases(bad heads, stuck heads, bad sectors, etc.). This is the first case where I'm pretty certain I'll need to replace this PCB with a donor board. Here's what I'm getting in terminal: ALFRecorder...

So here's an error I've never seen before after swapping heads in a Grenada (although I've seen it pop up on forums): Boot 0x40M Spin Up RECOV Servo Op=0100...

Does anyone here have access to a 256Gb Surface Pro? Specifically the 2017 edition if possible? I just need a copy of the default MBR sector. I managed to clone the built-in SSD except for sector 0 which is bad. There's a backup of the GPT at the end of the SSD, so that's not an issue. I...

So I don't currently have much to contribute here, but maybe some others can help turn this into a worthwhile sticky topic. I'll just add the one that I've recently learned and see if more follows. Toshiba Terminal Commands Enter Key (Should respond with ">" prompt) >NVA (disables the NAND...

So I've now devised a method that allows me to extract the preamp from the ROM code of many Seagate models very quickly. No need for modifying head maps and comparing using PC-3000 or anything like that. For those who have access to the secrets section, I've posted my methods there for you to...

Fortunately, it was a pretty quiet day on the forum so I don't think we lost more than a couple posts. I messed up part of my site from a bad plugin I attempted to use and I had to do a restore from yesterday's backup (good thing I keep those). Apologies to anyone who's post got erased.

So I've got an SSD here that was previously declared "unrecoverable" by Drive Savers. It's an M.2 but it has SATA lanes so I can attempt to connect to the PC-3000. On power up it instantly comes to a ready state, but any attempt to ID it or access sectors and it just gets stuck in a busy...

This is hilarious for anyone who hasn't already seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zCDvOsdL9Q

Anyone ever get this message in terminal after editing the SAP control flag to disable the top head? LED:000000BB FAddr:00004A18 LED:000000BB FAddr:00004A18 LED:000000BB FAddr:00004A18 LED:000000BB FAddr:00004A18

So I pulled this chip off an old Huawei U3900 flip phone for a customer who wants some pictures back. I had to dig it out of a lot of glue to get it off in one piece. I count 107 pins and I do see online some adapters for a BGA107 flash chip. E.G.: https://www.elnec.com/en/products/progr ...

Does anyone know if it's possible to read an IOMega Ditto drive in any OS newer than Windows 95? Perhaps in Linux? It's a tape drive system but It just plugs into a standard LPT port and was designed to be for standard desktop devices. I've got a customer who brought one in asking for me to...

So I figure I'll end my workday by posting a funny picture pulled from another company's advertisement (if you look closely at his shirt you can tell which one). First off, why is he just sitting there staring at the open Seagate drive? Second, are those safety glasses? :lol: :lol: :lol...

So after noticing someone trying to sell one of these on hddguru I decided to search YouTube to see if there was any video evidence that the tool really does exist. And, I managed to find this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_z1BeZkrik Looks like it does little more than read/write modules...

So this is a mystery to me. I happened to read this on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/c ... h=fcdfc439 Then I notice this on ripoffreport.com regarding the same company the reddit OP had used: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ai ... e-c-579678 Curious to know more, I...

So I'm starting this sticky topic to keep track of WD Gold drives that are really re-branded HGST ARM model hard drives. Unfortunately, I have none collected yet, but I'm working on that... Does anyone know what family works with WD4002FYYZ-01B7CB1?

Seagate has been buying up a few flash companies. I think they're cutting costs on their HDDs so they can push the profits toward this end. Even they can see the writing on the wall that spinners have a limited time left. I just wonder if they'll dump the Seagate name after all they've done...

Does anyone know where I can get an adapter for this Sandisk SSD model SD5SE2-128G-1002E ? I thought I finally had every adapter on the planet, but this one I apparently don't have. It's just like mSATA 18 pin, but it's smaller total width than that. I even tried ordering one specifically...

So I just noticed this post by Seagate on StorageReview.com: 20+ TB HAMR drives hitting the enterprise market before the end of year and consumer HAMR drives early next year. Get ready for some dual actuator, laser heated, SMR, helium-filled, 8 platter, nuclear disasters coming your way...

So here's something odd I've not seen before. External HDD containing HN-M201RAD HDD inside is described by the customer as having been dropped and not spinning now. Obviously I'm expecting to find that it's head stuck, but to my surprise, everything inside looks perfectly fine. Heads nicely...

Wait until one of us gets one of these babies in for data recovery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q

For reasons I don't feel like attempting to explain, I've got an iMac here that I can't re-install the SSD or it refuses to power on. I posted more details about that here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/33014474 I can mount the Fusion just fine on another Mac. I'm just wondering if...

Look out Europe! DriveSavers is trying to make a move in on your territory. They just opened a "drop-off location" in London (in addition to their 20 in the USA and Canada). https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/ ... ion-Europe Perhaps their business here is starting to drop some with...

Just got in the latest from Apex Tool Labs. Some nice platter holders: Very sturdy and heavy. As you can see they are made from the same grade steel as their workbench. Platters fit nicely onto them with zero resistance. Very nice tools for $150 - https://apextoollab.com/platters_holder...

So I've got a newer Barracuda Compute drive here that I'm trying to source a donor for. Nothing seems to be available on eBay yet, but maybe one of you guys have one you'd be willing to sell me. The drive I'm trying to match is as follows: Model: ST5000DM003 (5Tb not 500Gb) PN: 2FH18L-568 SN...

Does anyone have the newer version of PC-3000's TTL board? The one that has speeds that go up to 6000000 baud rate. I'm just curious what the TTL control chip on it is. I'm hoping to find a less expensive alternative than paying shipping from Russia and buying directly. I usually like to...

:roll: Honestly, I'm not sure if I'll be going back to post there anymore. This is the third time I've had a temporary ban there. Twice was because of HDDSurgery. At least here I know I won't get banned for speaking my mind. So, if you're going to post LDR requests or questions you...

So I'm working my way through some boxes of hard drives dropped off here for wiping. SSDs don't get dropped here too often and when they do we normally just use the manufacturer's utility to secure reset them and make recovery impossible. Today I got two Samsung SSDs in for wiping that are too...

Why have I been wasting all this money buying USB hard drives at ~$65/ea when I can get these 2Tb thumb drives for just $9.88? https://www.ebay.com/itm/2TB-1TB-512GB- ... duKsIb-TMQ What could possibly go wrong? :lol:

So around Nov-Dec of 2017 I started playing around with Wave Accounting as a possible alternative to using Quickbooks for my bookkeeping software. I immediately loved it. It could download all my PayPal transactions properly. I could upload or even just email receipts and it linked them with...

In case anyone didn't see it, R-TT is running a special this week: https://forum.r-tt.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9630 It's 25% off and that even includes the Tech License or support renewal for your existing licenses. Saved me $56 on my support period for my Tech license.

I don't get why people keep supporting terrible companies like HDDSurgery. First off, their tools are massively overpriced when there are alternative tools costing 1/4 the price and work just fine. Not to mention that for most cases you can homebrew tools which work even better than any...

I'm just curious if anyone has yet to attempt recovery from 3D Xpoint memory chips by direct chip-off methods yet? I see that they are now shipping in certain SSDs and Intel Optane memory modules. I'm just curious if they can even be read by any method similar to NAND. Perhaps one of you flash...

I know this was already mentioned on hddguru, but I just had to post it here for a laugh: So if Grenadas with 6 heads and one actuator have about a 40% failure rate, how will a 16 head double actuator fare? By my math, it'll have a 106% failure rate.

So I'm looking to update my pricing for the new year. Given that everything in life keeps getting more expensive, I think it's finally time to up the rate for certain projects. But, I also want to keep things affordable on the lower end of the spectrum. Currently, my pricing is as follows...

I'm considering looking into switching the forum to something like XenForo instead of the free phpBB that it's currently in. I know this will be a lot of work, and whatnot, but I'm hoping it might make for a more full-featured forum with a nicer feature for how-to guides and the likes. For an...

Get your microwaves ready boys :lol: :lol: :lol: Western Digital has announced their latest venture to increase HDD capacity: https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/p ... -data.html Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording I know we were all looking forward to sharks with freaking laser beams...

So I noticed this interesting article today: https://riscv.org/2017/12/anandtech-art ... platforms/ Seems that WD is planning to make a move away from their proprietary processors (mostly provided from Marvell) over to using ones based on RISC-V which is actually a more open instruction set...

Has anyone else noticed or been interested by these braille looking dot patterns under the PCB of modern HGST drives? These two pictures are from two drives with exactly the same specs right down to the date. The only difference is the serial number. Anyone have any idea how to read this code?

So I've been playing around with the compressed image format of the new DE version. But, I'm finding that while compressing areas that are full of data, the speed is dropping from 120Mb/s (in the blank areas) to around 50-60Mb/s when it's full of data. I see my i5 CPU is hitting around 95%...

So I'm trying to do some pre-emptive investigation toward being able to recover bitcoin wallet files. Specifically from the bitcoin core program that was used by the early bitcoin miners. It's not looking terribly difficult to write a custom xml for R-Studio to scan for them, but I'm not...

So I just saw this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughli ... 112f166b61 Looks like Toshiba will soon be shipping out 14Tb helium-filled 9 platter drives! That's right 9 platters, 18 heads, and full of Helium. It's not an SMR which I suppose is good news. According to another...

So I finally received one of these older WD My Passports that's asking for a password when the owner swears one was never set. I've checked both copies of module 25 as well as the key sector and they match exactly. I'm hoping to figure out what is flagging the drive to think it has a password...

So anyone who tried browsing to the forum/website earlier today probably was greeted with either an SSL/Unreachable error or if you came at the right time may have actually eneded up on a wedding planning site. :D Rest assured, it was just a screw up by my hosting company. I have a few...

Oh, wait...it's 1001 now... too bad, I missed my chance to create the 1000th one....

So what have you guys been using for these new WD30NPVX and WD40NPZZ series of drives that don't have any DCM code and often don't even have a date on them? Just going with the closest serial number you can find? Got one here now that I suspect will need heads, but they sure don't give you...

I just saw this page: https://starcraft2.com/en-us/#free-to-play If I disappear from the world for a few months, you'll know where I'm at.

I'd like to start a list of "recommended companies" here for when we get people online looking for a company in their part of the world. So, for example right now I'm talking with a guy online who needs a company with PC-3000 SSD in Brazil and I can't think of anyone in that area of the world I...

So this case fascinated me today. Seagate drive arrives for data recovery that was previously at Salvage Data who deemed it "unrecoverable" and cited "platter damage" as the reason. However, on inspecting the drive, I find absolutely no indication that it was ever opened. The top label is...

Has anyone else had this happen? Suddenly VNR software just acts like it completely doesn't see my VNR reader. I hear the usual Windows notification noise when I plug the reader into the computer, but VNR just acts like it's not connected. I've done all the usual stuff like remove and...

So this is something I've never seen before. I was giving a second look at a case for another lab, since he thought he was going crazy. Now, I'm pretty sure I'm going crazy as well after seeing what I saw. The drive is a Pinclite 320Gb drive. Has bad modules on both SA copies, but all the...

So I got in a drive that was previously at another lab, who'd already attempted head swap unsuccessfully (I won't name them here). I didn't really feel like wasting a perfectly good drive from my stock, so I devised this test method to see whether it was even a good candidate for recovery...

Is the forum unusually slow at loading pages today compared with usual or is it just for me? I've been messing around with my network and all the sudden this form seems to be loading really slowly with about a 4-5 second delay between page loads.

So I've got this really frustrating Moose family Seagate I'm fighting with today. Model: ST31000340NS Original symptoms: Spins up, sounds like a normal bit of accessing at first (nothing in terminal shows up) Then it starts clicking (still nothing in terminal). After about 40-50 clicks it...

So just in case, you haven't ever noticed this phenomenon, I figure I'll just post the warning here. It's something I've known for some time, but just had myself reminded of it again this morning when I messed up. If you read an Hitachi/HGST drive using the read by utility function of DE, then...

So I tried out a demo of a program (FileMinimizer Suite) that worked really well for removing file slack left over from RAW recovery results. You know, those cases where you've got jpegs that for some unknown reason carve out at 500Mb when they should be just a couple MB. The program works...

So has anyone here started researching APFS file system? I guess Apple has rolled it out, and it's about to start causing chaos I suspect. So far I can't find any software yet that supports it. Though, I do see this video which claims that Recon Imager can export a logical image of an APFS...

So this is what I hate about Seagate manufacturing and having to quote Seagate recoveries. I'm trying to recover a drive with the following specs: ST1000DM003 P/N: 1CH162-501 FW: CC44 Serial: S1D... Site: SU Date: 13451 Trying to figure out what preamp this drive is likely to have. Based on...

So I'm probably not the only one who's annoyed by the Windows smart move taking an hour to just rename a folder that is full of data (something we do daily in data recovery). Apparently, this Smart Move popup that appears whenever you rename a folder full of files is creating symbolic links in...

So I had some PDF files that were only partially recovered and client needed them back in a hurry. Other PDF repair software didn't seem to be working well, but then I tried this: https://www.pdf-online.com/osa/repair.aspx Actually worked quite well. It charges a few euro per PDF, unless...

I'm looking for a loader for Big BearH family with consolidated ROM version 0003002J if anyone has it would be much appreciated. Full resources would be nice if you have that too. :D

I'm just posting this picture here for someone, but I might as well make it public in case someone else needs it. Here are the capacitors to remove and solder onto for SATA connection for My Passport PCB 2060-771961: Be sure you solder in your wires to the pad closer to the main IC after...

So seeing as how the forum is much older now compared with when I first added the ranks, I've decided to adjust the number of posts to reach certain rankings. Here are the current rankings: 0-50 posts - Data Recovery Noob 50-199 - Data Recovery Novice 200-399 - Experienced DR Tech 400-699 -...

So this is an odd one that I still haven't had the chance to get to the bottom of yet. Drive was a Hitachi desktop drive that had a fair amount of bad sectors but nothing major wrong with it otherwise. Partition table shows just a single partition starting at sector 63 and going to the end of...

It seems to me that the PC-3000 ROM utility is mis-designating the logical and physical head maps. For example, I've got a ST1000DL002 drive where the actual physical head map is 01 03 05 (all top side heads). The physical head map in the utility shows the head map as 00 01 02, but the logical...

So today I had my first opportunity to test out the new Seagate Slim head combs from ApexToolLab (formerly known as AceToolLab). I must say, they work great as always. Here's a picture I snapped of it in place: (Ignore the scratched platters, it was just a test drive) It slides in nice and...

Well, I was thinking about offering a good discount on data recovery services for the flood victims of Hurricane Harvey. But, then I saw this: That's a pretty hard price to compete with. I've got friends in San Antonio. Maybe I'll have them submit a couple of my nightmare cases for me...

So I just saw this today: https://www.wdc.com/products/external-s ... 00JBK-NESN 20TB of encrypted. data in RAID 0. What could ever go wrong? Lol

Just a warning to anyone who's using a recent version of PC-3000, the ARM ROM programming doesn't work right. I used it to attempt programming a Toshiba branded 7210DLE6 ARM family drive, and it just bricked the PCB. ROM transfer confirmed that the original ROM code wasn't the issue. I...

Has anyone else been watching the TV show Containment? It's pretty funny that they've got people hiding out from a virus outbreak inside a supposed data recovery company clean room. What's funny is that they've apparently got couches and apple laptops inside this clean room, but not a hard...

Got this lead emailed to me by thumbtack and had a good laugh: I think I'll pass on it. :lol:

Well, this is a new first for me. In all the hundreds of data recovery cases I've handled, I've yet to see a single BTRFS formatted drive show up for recovery....until today. It threw me for a loop at first. The drive had bad sectors at the beginning so I couldn't read the MBR to see the...

I just happened to see this in a search: https://www.walmart.com/ip/WD40NMZW-11G ... /660788378 I know it's really Donor Drives selling through Walmart's website, but it's pretty stinking funny to see this on Walmart regardless.

Here's a new tool I've created so you can find a drive family just by typing the model into a box. Enjoy! :D

I'm planning to do some extensive RAID card meta data research in the near future (been buying up common cards to research) and I'm looking for a way to hot swap PCIe controllers without always needing to restart. I know normally you'll always have to reboot to add in a new PCIe card as they're...

A feature that'd really make it worth paying for the pro version of hddsuperclone, is the ability to work with non-standard sector sizes. You know those 520 byte EMC drives. If it could read those drives and migrate to 512-byte sectors on the destination, that'd really make it a miracle tool...

I'm probably not the only one who's been annoyed by how ahrefs basically killed all free accounts (unless you give cc info and sign up for a $99 paid plan temporarily). I've found that this site is a pretty good alternative for running site comparison, keyword analysis, etc.: serpstat.com

For those of you who can't justify spending 300 € on hddsurgery's overpriced head holder tool :lol: (which I assume is pretty much everyone) Here's an alternative that costs $36 and works every bit as well: https://www.amazon.com/Panavise-D08001- ... 000SX1ZN0/ Best part is, you can even...

So I notice this in my email this morning: Looks like a Hitachi/HGST to me. So I guess WD is selling their laptop drives as HGST now, and selling HGST drives as their "enterprise" drives. The brand name confusion continues.

I'm just curious if anyone on here is an expert when it comes to using JTAG for reading memory from phones, tablets, etc. I've got a few questions as I'm looking at possibly getting into this more.

So this is something I haven't seen before. This ST500LM000 drive arrived head stuck. After freeing up the heads I powered it on, it ID'd just fine. I started to backup resources and during the process PC-3000 automatically power cycled it. As soon as it powered down, it got head stuck...

I'm finding something odd here that I've never experienced before. Perhaps it's just an issue with my only PCB of this family. I've got a Mars family drive here I'm working on, original PCB is completely cooked, and is one that stores the ROM code in the main IC rather than the U12. I've got...

Looks like modifying their posts has finally gotten back to the company. I got a nasty email from them about my "unethical activities" on the forum for calling their software "junk". haha. They're the filthy spammers who relentlessly hound this forum with fake posts and dropping affiliate...

Well, it seems that we had a total fumble of an attempt to update/upgrade the forum today. Things just kept going further and further sideways the more I tried to fix it. I finally had to just do a rollback of the forum to yesterday. So anything you posted in the last 24 hours is gone. :(

So I just saw this amazing piece of technology drop: http://www.acelaboratory.com/news/newsi ... itemid=206 Looks like Ace is moving into the realm of mobile device recovery. If they live up to their normal reputation they'll have a well documented / updated / supported solution. Glad I...

So I'm looking through my google search console to see where I'm ranking for some keywords and I find this hilarious entry: Why would someone be searching for "RAID recovery services Kim Kardashian", and why would google think that applies to my site. :lol: There's not one reference to her...

So I just stumbled upon this software: http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/download.shtml It looks frighteningly close to R-Studio, like an older but more Java looking version. Interestingly though the version is 9.1.8 whereas R-Studio is only at version 8.3.16. I even notice that the companies...

I see that HDD Head Tools (AKA DFL) has posted an E-Book about hard drive donor sourcing. Anyone actually read this and know if it contains any useful information beyond what's already been posted on donor drives and other public places? http://www.hddheadtools.com/product/don ... head-swap/

Looks like Ace has just updated the express card to add some new features: http://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopi ... 35&t=9287f Seems they've added some power monitoring, a speaker, and some "power supply modification" to increase reading speeds.

Someone just tried to drop a post requesting to trade child porn on this forum. I've obviously banned them by username, IP, email address, etc. However, they might come back. Moderators, please keep an eye out in case they try to return using a proxy and a new account.

I'm working on a rush case, and just had to share what this MFT looks like. It's got a perfectly defined scratch pattern. You can clearly see how it does each full rotation before hitting the next few bad sectors.

Has anyone done a lot of testing with crossing drive revisions with a totally different code after the / ? I'm assuming the format of the revision code is (hardware) / (firmware) so it may not matter what's after the slash for matching heads. Anyone take the time to really figure this one out...

So I just saw this posted on R-TT forum: New features: + Support for mdadm RAIDs + Support for Apple CoreStorage/File Vault/Fusion Drive That right there just about doubled R-Studio's value in my mind. :D

Hi JakeTse, you are allowed to talk about your products here. Spam isn't strictly prohibited as long as it's data recovery related. However, you must disclose that your represent the software and request "official representative" status. Please let me know if you represent this program and I...

Just want to let you all know that I've adjusted the color scheme of the code boxes (for those of you using the default theme, not prosilver) to make it easier to read. Hopefully you can read this easier than the old green on tan color scheme

OK, I know this isn't exactly "data recovery" but it's something you may wish to do in your data recovery work. For example, let's say you've got a below average intelligence customer who's data is buried deep into their folder structure and you know that simply giving them a folder location is...

I've created a few new sub reddits on reddit.com where you can post links to blog posts and videos you create. Blog Posts http://www.reddit.com/r/DataRecoveryBlog Videos http://www.reddit.com/r/DataRecoveryVideos Please feel free to post there. I will block anything that's just outright...

So I just finished up creating a new way for customers to submit cases online: https://www.data-medics.com/data-recove ... orization/ Tell me what you think of the new system. (feel free to submit a fake entry, just be sure I can tell it's fake :D )

So I'm considering setting up Google Chrome push notifications on this forum. That way if you're following a topic you'll get that little pop-up box in the corner of your desktop when a reply is posted. Anyone think this is a good idea? Anyone who would actually use it? Does anyone hate the...

Now I'm no fan of DriveSavers myself, but it looks like someone is really out to get them. I happened to be comparing some site metrics (comparing my site to theirs) and I noticed a huge jump in the number of new domains linking to them. Then I see this: Looks like someone is building...

In my opinion Seagate's lock on the terminal is nothing more than a way to monopolize the recovery of their own drives to their own lab. It's no different than if a car company was to put a lock on the hood of a car so only their service centers could work on the engine. I'm considering...

Just a couple questions for you flash experts on here. I've got a thumbdrive that was previously soldered on and it's missing at least one component, which I'm assuming was a resistor. Though, it's possible that it's just a bridge (but I can't see why that would be necessary if it was)...

So I'm adding this sticky to keep track of known Samsung terminal commands and their function. I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to working in Samsung terminal, so please feel free to correct me if anything I post is inaccurate. BT - switches from ENG> to BOOT> level for ROM downloading Esc...

I'm looking for some alternative programs to HyperTerminal, since it's no longer included with windows 10. I've used Putty and it's variant Kitty, but they are both lacking a key function. Neither one can download/upload a file over serial connection like HyperTerminal could. So while you can...

Not sure if you guys saw this yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeUCvlCKmCI Seems pretty cool and much easier than soldering a million wires under a microscope. I guess I just wonder how well it'll work if you need to re-arrange and overlap the pins. Are they all a slightly different...

This one really surprised me. Got a 5 platter 10 head 4Tb HDS724040ALE640 that came in totally seized after a good drop. Heads were stuck to platters, bearing totally seized. With enough force I managed to get the bearing to spin so I could safely remove the heads. However the spindle had an...

While I don't actually do any forensics work, occasionally I've been asked to acquire a drive image along with an MD5 or SHA-1 checksum. Perhaps adding in a --forensic trigger (even if it's in the paid version) would be really awesome. Even if it just created a log file at the end with the...

So, I've finally come up with a good way to store HDD PCBs that doesn't take up a ton of space and is really easy to find the one you need: That's right, CD jewel cases w/o the actual CD trays inside. Now it's just a matter of time before my wife gets them all organized and on the racks.

Just so you all know the vendor HddSurgery has been banned from this forum as they seem intent on personal attacks toward myself and others whenever someone questions the price of their products. I've had a bit more of them than I'm willing to tolerate. I've removed all links to their...

I've got an odd case here doing something I've never seen before. It's a Toshiba MK8032GAX that sounds to be spinning up normally, but all status indicators are solid as you can see here: I can get terminal, and can do things like read MP RAM, even read the ROM code. My first thought was...

Is anyone else now getting an annoying popup in their Windows 10 taskbar advertising that Microsoft Edge is faster than Chrome? This is very annoying. If M$ keeps up this forced advertising on all computers I think business are going to start strongly wishing there was an alternative...

So this is something I've never seen before. I've got a WD My Passport Shrek LT family. I can backup SA modules just fine from both copies and they all pass checks. However, I can't read tracks from the drive. It acts like it's hitting bad sectors in every track. Even gives the "DISK DAM...

Just to let you all know, I've been doing some updates under the hood and I discovered that the cookies on this forum weren't being transferred SSL. I've now enabled it to resolve a different issue (solved that one) but it may cause a conflict with any old cookies stored in your browser...

I'm looking for full SA resource backup for Jamacia family ROM F/W Version: 00160027 I've got a lot of non-critical modules I need to replace, some of which I can't read by composite. I've already extracted the LDR from the drive, but need the other resources. Thanks!

So here is something I've never seen before, perhaps some of you have. I've got a 500Gb Seagate SSHD here which was clicking. When I open it I find traces of dust on the platters & top cover. I decided to try cleaning the read/write heads as they all seemed to be attached and looked OK to the...

I'm having an odd issue with a couple of WD NAS drives that seem to be running WD encryption. PC-3000 only detects the "Self Encryption HDD" key, not any other key. However, if I use that key the data, though changed, still appears encrypted. I'm wondering if this is one that isn't supported...

I'll be out of the country for the next three weeks and I don't suspect I'll have internet most of the time. So I'm trusting in you moderators to keep out any garbage that's posted. I'm not so concerned about the SPAM as much as I am about anything obscene or inappropriate getting posted by...

Does anyone know if the latest version of PC-3000 software is able to unlock this model: ST4000LM016 from the "diagnostic port locked" terminal? I'm running a bit outdated version, but I suspect this model might still not be supported even if I upgrade.

I'm trying to manually rebuild a lost core storage GPT partition table (computer tech accidentally deleted it). I've already determined the starting and ending sectors of the partition, but it seems no matter what I do I can't get MacOS to recognize this stupid thing as a core storage volume...

I don't know if anyone has ever kept track of this (I know I haven't until now) but I think I'm going to do a running list of the maximum baud rate that different Seagate families can use to read/write ROM via boot ROM code. Grenada: 921000 (some will read at 921600) Kahuna: 921000 Bogart...

Just like we're doing for the Grenada drives I'm going to use this thread to keep track of Bogart family preamps. Maybe by studying a few of these we can get to the bottom of how exactly to match these. Feel free to add yours below too. ST1000DL002 W1V 9TT153-570 CC98 12404 WU Preamp: A8 35...

Anyone ever seen this series of errors before: (DOS) Marginal Read: 0009A6A508 (DOS) Marginal Read: 0009A6A509 (DOS) Marginal Read: 0009A6A50A (DOS) Marginal Read: 0009A6A50B (DOS) Marginal Read: 0009A6A510 (DOS) Marginal Read: 0009A6A516 (DOS) Marginal Read: 0009A6A519 (DOS) Marginal Read...

I'm posting this here just in case my customer follows the forum. I've got a case here which has me truly baffled. I've handled a lot of similar cases, but this one I just can't figure out. Drive came in it was head stuck. I freed the heads up carefully. On power up the drive fully ID's shows...

Is it just my imagination, or did both of these companies let go of all their intelligent technical staff when they split? It's like they split up their tech department in half, then put monkeys in to fill in the gaps on both fronts. My RANT: Hey PayPal, guess what! every business on this...

So here's some strange behavior I've never quite seen before. It ultimately came down to a bad PCB, but it was still pretty crazy. Drive is an Aries family 2.5" WD. First time powering on - nothing, no spinning, clicking, hum, nada Second time (with my ear on it) - spins right up, ID's First...

So it seems that whenever Prosoft's activation servers go down it deactivates all copies of their software. I'm trying to run Data Rescue 4, and it's now giving a "Validation Failed" message when I try to launch the program. I checked and their homepage is down too, so I can't run the program...

This is a warning for anyone who uses MacDrive (and possibly other HFS software) along with DE to copy to Mac formatted destinations. I've observed something dangerous that seems to have only started occurring since the latest Windows update. Occasionally MacDrive will randomly disconnect and...

Hey guys, just want to say thanks to all of you for helping to make this forum a success. Especially you hard working moderators who've helped to keep the spammers out. I just noticed today that when you google: "data recovery forum" this is now the #1 result. :D Hopefully, it doesn't...

This is just awesome: http://shop.hddwatches.com/Black_PVD_HD ... 90738.aspx

So here's something really annoying about Microsoft I just discovered. I've long used a personal Microsoft account with Onedrive where I could take part of an excel sheet and embed it into a website. Recently I upgraded my personal to a business Office 365 account, which is a nightmare because...

Just for anyone else who's tasked with wiping EMC drives that are 520byte sector size and can't have the sector size adjusted via the normal means you can still erase the drive completely and zero fill it just using the following command in the SG3_Utils linux package: If the drive will allow...

Just for anyone out there who doesn't feel like fighting with the manual way of installing this package into Debian Linux or its variants such as Sparky Linux which I use. Here's the easy way to do it: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade sudo apt-get install software-properties-common...

I've created a sub-Reddit on reddit.com to just have a place where we can all push out new blog posts on our site and get the link back. I find it's helpful to just get them indexed faster in Google. Anyway, feel free to post your blog links here: http://www.reddit.com/r/datarecoveryblog Luke...

I'm looking for a LDR for this drive, I'm actually not 100% sure what the family is. Model: WD30NPRZ-82YRMT0 Consolidated ROM: 0002000U I'll take anything close that you have. Even if it's a different ROM version, as long as it's the same family. I'd just need both ROM and LDR if the ROM...

So I've spent the last several hours learning how to script Windows Explorer shortcuts to prompt searches and actually met with some success. For example here's a shortcut which when run will search all drives (except C:) for quickbooks *.qbw and *.qbb files. I'm probably going to create a...

So I'm starting this sticky to keep track of families which can be used as cross-compatible heads donors if matched correctly. Here's what I've confirmed so far: Dolphin & Mercury Mariner & Marn5 4K Tahoe 2D & Vulcan RE Sabre 53 and Sabre 58 Jamaica & Jamaica 4K Tornado 2D and Tornado 2PMR...

I've been looking for two weeks and can't seem to find a good donor for this one: Model: WD20EARS-00MVWB0 Date: 11 Jun 2012 DCM: HHRNNTJCH Country: Malaysia I can find ones that are from Thailand, or ones that are about a year off on the date, but no good matches. Anybody have one they are...

OK, so I'm going nuts trying to find a donor for under $300 which has S24 as the first three of serial. The drive is a ST1500DM003 P/N: 9YN16G-021, but I'm even looking at ST2000DM001's which I know also use the S24 heads. The only affordable one I can find is over a year off on the date (need...

OK, so I'm having a good laugh looking at a youtube video of a company who popped up across town advertising their "professional" data recovery services. I'm watching their video and I see this: I don't even know what that machine is, but I'm pretty sure it's something medical and has...

So I've been trying to pay attention to Seagate serial numbers to see if I can make any additional sense of it. So far this is what I think I've figured out about the first few digits. First Digit - Some sort of site location code. This one tends to often follow the site code SU = S, WU = W...

So my next project is to start keeping track of Seagate part numbers and how they relate to head compatibility. Obviously the first three of serial is most important to matching, but sometimes you might want to look for a drive with more heads from a higher capacity drive. So I figure it'll be...

I've got a DVR unit here that malfunctioned slightly and isn't showing the last recorded clip of video which the customer needs. He was smart and shut it down right after the incident, he had even viewed the video once before shutting it down. However, on power up the last segment of video was...

I've added a reel where my recent blog posts get posted automatically in a feed at the bottom of each of the forum pages. It's really just there for the sake of SEO and channeling my internal link structure to keep the blog relevant in the eyes of Google. The forum is growing so fast it's...

Does anyone know if there is a SATA family which is heads compatible with the USB only Dolphin family drives? I'm thinking Mercury might be, as they use a compatible SATA PCB for the family. Anyone tried this? There just isn't much available for this odd family. Or can anyone at least verify...

It's not making any headlines yet, but I'm pretty certain that Skype has been hacked. I've been getting SPAM messages from several contacts today with links to some baidu.com redirect link to sell some brain boost formula junk. At first I just figured it was probably the result of a spammy app...

Watching the advertising videos from a lot of other data recovery companies, I'm always seeing an oscilloscope with a sine wave on it. I'm well aware of what an oscilloscope is and what it does, I just can't see any reason to need one for most types of data recovery. Do any of you actually use...

So I just got a new microscope, which is much better than what I've had previously. Just look at the detail you can see of a slider at really good magnification: It looks like a Klingon Bird of War...must be some Trekkies at WD.

Threads like this is why Tom's Hardware should be shut down: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... l#18806016 You disagree with one idiot moderator, who is flat out lying to someone then you get banned. Perhaps we can all chime in and tell the mod what an idiot he is before I get banned...

I think our constantly changing their spam messages is finally starting to get noticed. I've actually been contacted by one such company who's known to occasionally spam like that asking about having an actual Software Rep account on here. As long as they make clear that they are...

I'm pretty sure this drive has bad heads, but just looking for some confirmation. It spins up, I hear repeated SA accessing in a rhythmic repeating pattern (almost like clicking but softer). Then it comes ready and allows terminal. Here's what I get in terminal though: Then it locks and...

So, has anyone found a reader for these new memory cards Samsung is rolling out yet? I'm intrigued by Micron's description that it uses a serial interface: Compared to eMMC: Looks almost like it's using SATA channels internally. Perhaps a UFS to SATA adapter board will be in order.

I'm finally starting to see some results of my SEO work. Loving seeing this: Take THAT DriveSavers! This is nice to see too:

OK, I'm creating this sticky to just keep track of which preamp type is in which of these drives. Given how many head swaps we are doing on these, I think it'd be nice to get it down to a little better science, so perhaps we can more loosely match these when the exact part number isn't...

Anyone else here having customers with issues opening their old iPhotos library in the new MacOS? I've had a few recent ones where 100% of sectors were recovered, yet the new Photo's app says the database is corrupted. Apple's solution is to "update to the latest version" which doesn't help...

Boy would I love to build a RAID 5 in my PC-3000 machine using a half dozen of these babies: https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Samsu ... 79174.aspx Could store a whole lot of HDD images at really high speed that way. If I only hade $60,000 to throw at it.

Figure this is as good a place as any to keep track of the less than perfect donor matches that end up working out even though they probably shouldn't. Here's mine from today: Patient Model: HTS725032A9A364 P/N: 0A73293 MLC: DA3247 Date: 05 Sep 10 Headmap: 1 2 3 Donor Model: HTS725050A9A364...

So I've got an odd case here. Model: WD20EARS-00MVWB0 PCB: 2060-771698-002 Rev A Drive was described as stopped working after moving the computer. They took it to the local computer tech, who said it wasn't spinning and referred them here. On my evaluation I find that the drive is in fact...

So here's something I just gleaned from a T13 email series that I've been privy to. It's a list of all vendor specific S.M.A.R.T. attributes by vendor as well as the basic generic ones. Not sure why it'd be useful, but you never know. Here's the list:

So I'm on Tom's hardware a minute ago and I see this pop up on the side of the page: It's a Seagate branded chat widget on the storage section of Tom's Hardware forum!!! :lol: I wonder if they are hoping to do some damage control over all the bad press they are getting when people keep...

So I generally avoid phone recoveries because it's not very profitable and usually a huge time waster. But, I've got one of those insistent customers who wants me to look at their phone for them. The phone is an iPhone 4S stuck at the iTunes connect screen. I've already attempted doing the...

I'm starting to see why people hate data recovery companies. Many of them are just plain despicable criminals who lie, cheat and steal from their customers. Today I get in a Seagate ST2000MD001 (probably should have been a typical media cache fix). Unfortunately they went to another data...

OK, so I'm working on a 32Gb single NAND case here which I'm thinking is a bit non-standard (as most are I realize). The chip has no markings, but ID's as "8988244BA9" In the VNR DB I find two different page sizes listed with this NAND: 8640 (all but one show this), and 8592 (only one shows...

OK, I know this is a topic that I've discussed before but I'm visiting it again because it actually needs to get done this time. I've got a case here using a typical TSOP-48 8Gb NAND that can't leave my office for legal reasons. It's got to be done here, but I'm really not looking to invest...

I don't know why R-TT doesn't document this anywhere (AND I MEAN ANYWHERE!!!) but if you're trying to launch R-Studio in Linux the terminal command is: sudo rstudio-tech Took me a half hour to figure that out. I think companies like R-TT often forget that Linux doesn't always create a nice...

So I've got this Seagate ST9750423AS that came it. it's been to two other data recovery places already who gave up on it. On arrival the heads are stuck to the platters (I'm assuming they put it back this way). After freeing it up the drive IDs but shows zero capacity. System file 28 seems...

Call me crazy, but these two labels look oddly similar coming from HGST and Seagate. I hope they are just buying labels from the same company and not starting to intermeddle their manufacturing too.

Anyone care to recommend a good tool used for field acquisition of a HDD in the field that is forensically sound? I have a customer who wants to pay me to drive two hours away to image a drive and attempt recovery. I already know lawyers are involved, and I keep telling them I'm not a...

I'm posting this thread in the hopes of having a list of compatible SATA replacement PCBs for USB native drives. Here's what I've got so far (based on PCB numbers): USB -------------> SATA 100725482 ---> 100720903 100740633 ---> 100739392 100760718 --->100720903 100765396 ---> 100767980...

Here's a quick trick I just learned to quickly check if T.R.I.M. is enabled on any SSD or eMMC computer / tablet running Windows. Just open up a CMD prompt as admin and type in: fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify If it returns: DisableDeleteNotify = 0 Then TRIM is enabled and your...

I haven't spent very much time working on Fujitsu drives as they are pretty scarce these days, so please excuse me if this is a noob question. I see that PC-3000 has the feature to read/write ROM on many of these models, but it doesn't work even on perfectly healthy drives. Just out of sheer...

So yesterday I got in a Surface 3 which uses eMMC instead of an SSD for its memory. The device was functional, but data had been accidentally deleted. I tried a number of Linux live builds but most would hang on boot. Finally, I was able to image it using a bootable copy of Clonezilla...

I'm getting an error I've never seen before. When I try to do DIR upload after doing LRD upload, I'm getting this error: "RGN list state 0 cannot be set" Even if I block SA access, I still get the same issue. Any ideas what this means? I'm just trying to fix up the SA of a drive that...

Just FYI, you really can't trust the WD preamp vendor and revision numbers to be accurate. At least not in older families such as Mammoth. I've got a case here where I tried two different drives which should have been a match according to PC-3000 however, both sets click when in the patient...

I just decided to make a quick video to show how to do this. Seems a lot of guys haven't figured it out yet, and it comes up from time to time on other forums. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q25KTJHkr4A

I don't do much for phone recoveries, because I don't find it all that profitable. However I do occasionally have an insistent customer who really wants me to try recovering something from an Android phone, often from phones that are stuck in a boot loop or otherwise not fully loading to the OS...

Sorry about the spotty service yesterday. I've never had any reliability issues since switching hosts, but yesterday seems that somehow the server was hit with traffic that was way beyond my limits (never even came close before). Seems like someone may have been running a denial of service...

I'm looking for a donor for the following drive: Model: ST1000LM024 P/N: HN-M101MBB/AV2 Rev. A F/W: 2BA30001 DOM: 01/2014 Site: DGT Existing heads are all mangled, so I can't check what the preamp number is. Here's a picture of the label:

So I'm strongly considering the future idea of franchising out the Data Medics company name into a franchise opportunity for those looking to get into the business and not wanting to struggle so long to build up a customer base in their local area. Obviously some initial training (maybe two or...

This is one ugly looking MFT: Looks like it has smallpox. Should make for an interesting mess of finding all his files.

Looks like Seagate is desperate to rebrand their image with some different names. They just posted this about their new series of NAS drives that go up to 10TB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaYpYk0kVpQ And this one for their re-launched Barracuda series...

So this morning I'm seeing again one of HP's Star TreK commercials about this "The Machine" computer they are hyping as the future. So out of curiosity I started looking into what it is and found this interesting article: http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/themachine/ Among other things it says...

Looks like Toshiba and WD are opening a new co-op factory in Japan to make flash memory. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2 ... ning-Fab-2 I wonder if the number of companies making drives is going to get even smaller soon.

So, I'm thinking about starting a co-op project to develop best practice standards for "ethical data recovery" procedures. Obviously no one could develop an exhaustive how to manual for how to do the work, but what I'm picturing is more of a standard of what should and shouldn't be done in the...

Take a look at this advertisement I pulled from Tom's Hardware: Drobo BeyondRAID (near impossible to recover) + Seagate (imminent drive failures) = NIGHTMARE!!!

I'm only posting this so I can send a link of it to someone. I know it's not anything new you don't all already know. Here's how to figure out WD preamp version in pictures:

I'm having a programmer work on a project to help determine parity rotation and stripe size on reed solomon RAID 6 arrays, however I'll need a few samples to send the programmer for testing purposes. All I need is a small sample pulled from the same LBA region of each member disk, perhaps of...

I know this is nothing new, but I just discovered a really simple way to remove the hidden attribute from any folder. Just navigate to where the folder is contained (E.G. D:\ or D:\folder1\) in CMD prompt. Then type in attrib -H -S "folder name" /S /D And the hidden attribute is instantly...

Is it just me or is getting meaningful backlinks nearly impossible in this industry? The only real way I can see to get backlinks is to resort to spammy techniques like companies such as Tenorshare use, or to just buy links on the blogs that sell them. I'd much prefer to do things all "white...

I have a client hit with a ransomware virus that encrypted all his data and converted it all to the following format: (filename)[email protected] I know this is a Russian virus, and I know that the BAA14811 part is the unique infection ID. However I've been unable to find the...

OK, I've never done anything like this because I'm not a childish tit-for-tat type of person. However this idiot has pushed me to my limit. I've never even done any business with him, short of one phone call he made to us. Then he starts spewing nonsense about how data recovery guys are all...

Anyone here ever work on one of these: https://www.amazon.com/LaCie-All-Terrai ... hard+drive ??? It's a Lacie Rugged SAFE fingerprint reading external hard drive. I may have one coming in, and I'm curious how the fingerprint/encryption combination is handled. I'm told it's a Seagate internal...

If you've got a half hour to burn, read through this entire thread and tell me what you think. Am I crazy, or do I just attract insane potential clients? https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/c ... ike_heads/ Feel free to respond to this clown too. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Today I suddenly got this error when I tried to open a task: The "TTask.Create - CreateDrive - Invalid source device type!" error. Both trying to open Task.prm and Task.bak files gave this error, yet I could open other tasks just fine (I know others had this issue after a drive letter...

So I'm considering looking into setting up a hardware brute force decryption machine for the purpose of breaking WD's encryption. Perhaps something like this: https://sagitta.pw/hardware/gpu-compute-nodes/invictus/ only homemade. According to this article it seems that it's totally doable to...

Just had a case I started on this week. DriveSavers gave up on it and declared it "unrecoverable due to too much media damage". On arrival I see that the drive ID's and shows capacity, able to read both copies of SA just fine. However drive is unable to access sectors. I regenerate ROM from...

Anyone have a good recommendation for MDB file repair software? Specifically one that's good for database files with bad sectors. I know there's a million options for this, I'm just curious what other guys have found to be effective. Got a case right now with a few MDB's and I know there's a...

I'm looking for a donor for the following drive WD2500JB-00KFA0 Date: May 2005 DCM: ****CTJ** Country: Malaysia Headmap: 0 1 3 4 5 However I know that a WD3200JB-00KFA0 will work too, and is likely to have all the right heads even if I don't need them all. Anyone have either of these disks...

Has anyone ever successfully used heads from a Caviar 32 drive to replace heads in a Marvell family drive? I'm having a fun time trying to find a second donor for this one Buccaneer family drive. However I've got a pile of drives here built the same week, with the same SPT (areal density)...

Me: "Are you sure it's the original PCB, it doesn't seem like it?" Customer: "Yes, we didn't try anything" What I find: I highly doubt that Western Digital put two foam pads under the PCB. :lol:

This must be one of the first days in a while where there was virtually no activity on this forum. Even other forums were pretty dead today. We must all be busy with actual work or something. :lol:

As requested I've added forums for Forensics and Cyber Security as well as a section for forensic tools such as X-ways. If anyone has any suggestions of other forensic tools you'd like a section for please let me know and I can add it. I've noticed a lot more malware and ransomware discussion...

What do you guys think? This site http://www.filesaversdatarecovery.com has this phrase under their logo: "The Data Recovery Medics" Seems like trademark infringement to me. I normally wouldn't care, except that they created a Cranston, RI page. No one outside of RI has ever heard of...

I've made a new little estimator tool to quote jobs online for those who don't want to pick up the phone. Looking for feedback: https://www.data-medics.com/cost-of-dat ... ine-quote/

Does anyone know of a way to disable a copy of the SA in ROM? I can see that I can edit regions and whatnot, but the issue I'm having is that copy 1 of the SA is really destroyed and it's making the drive unstable to image. I can get the drive to ID and read sectors fine now just off of head 0...

So today my stock image site http://www.dollarphotoclub.com finally shut down as part of their sale to Adobe stock, who greedily wants 3x the price per image and lets your unused images that you pay for expire (not happy). I'll never give a single penny to Adobe Stock if for no good reason than...

OK, so I've got my nightmare of the month case here. Just to quickly recap what's been done. 4TB WD Red drive had a blown motor chip on the PCB. Customer tried replacing the PCB themselves with new one and ROM transfer (cooking new PCB in the process, but didn't harm ROM thankfully). This...

Here's a list of compatible USB to SATA boards for conversion: USB ---------> SATA Confirmed: G3448A --------> G003235B or G003235C G003309A -----> G003235B or G003235C G003296A -----> G003138A or G003235C G003250A -----> G003138A G003054A -----> G002825A G3959A --------> G3918A G003189A...

Here's the Diablo3D family LDR's:

Does anyone have a copy of this virus? I want to do some VM sandbox tests to see exactly what it does and determine what options are available for possible recovery. Please let me know if you have it, but don't post it here. Wouldn't want someone to get infected from reading this forum.

Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture and caption taken at Drivesavers: http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0 ... o=4,00.asp I'm pretty sure running a drive with the top cover removed is a really bad way to recover data. Should we tell the guys at DriveSavers they're doing...

Look at this site: hxxp://www.raiddatarecovery.org (I xx'd out the url so they don't get the backlink) They totally ripped off my site. They copied the content so hard, they didn't even remember to change the company name in some places such as: You can see the service mark "Data Medics"...

I've been working on a solution to effectively repair corrupted jpg files damaged by unread bad sectors, and I think I've finally worked up a solution that's can effectively restore pictures with a few bad sectors to an acceptable condition (the ones that open but the image is shifted...

I'm creating this sticky to track which utility is able to work with which Toshiba branded drives, since the model numbers don't match the utility names. Here's what I've collected so far: DT01ABA300 = 7210DLE6 ARM Utility DT01ACA300 = 7210DLE6 ARM Utility DT01ACA100 = 7210DLE6 ARM Utility...

So today I just discovered something about Seagate part numbers, perhaps you guys already know this. The Fourth Digit: Is the Interface Type (generally 0 for IDE, and 1 for SATA) So you can look for donors with the opposite one if it's a model they made both versions of. E.G.: These two are...

Anyone know a good method to remove a couple sliders that are stuck to the platters? And not on the top platter but rather sandwiched in between like you see here: And a video where you can see them both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pel1t3dFUHI&feature=youtu.be

Here's an odd case that I'm just finishing up. It's a Samsung HM500JI drive. It ID's and shows correct capacity but errors out immediately on any attempt to access sectors. Does take a little long to come ready, but only about 40 seconds. I check modules and it has damaged A-List and...

So today I'm having a really odd issue that's getting in the way of progress....Suddenly, every computer here can only browse to SSL websites. Anything non SSL just doesn't respond. It can't be anything on the computers, because it's all of them, even ones that have been offline for weeks...

I'm thinking of rigging up one or two ultrasonic cleaning units to attempt cleaning of dirty read/write heads & possibly platters in some cases. I see talk on this thread of using 99-100% pure isopropyl alcohol to do it. However I know others claim that alcohol leaves a residue behind. So I'm...

Looks like ACE has finally beat Seagate's encryption and will be releasing the technique soon: http://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopi ... 537#p30537

So today I suddenly notice that my OS SSD in my PC-3000 system is warning that it's full. Which is very odd because I don't store anything there, just programs. Even my !profiles folders are all stored on my 24TB RAID array in the same system. So I ran WinDirStat to find what's eating up all...

I'm helping a guy remotely to recover a RAID 5 from a Dell Server using a PERC S100 controller (found model in metadata). Unfortunately it looks like someone initialized the drives and overwrote the partition tables. Anyone know what the default stripe size is on this controller? The manual...

I just stumbled upon this whitepaper from EMC while doing some research for a possible case coming in. I think it's the best explanation I've ever seen of how RAID 6 actually calculates double parity and how it uses it to restore lost blocks in a two drive failure. Anyone wanting to really...

Here's Denali Family LDRs:

Here's Cypress Family:

Here's Cougar Family:

Does anyone know of a place you can buy external hard drives in bulk at a good price? I sell about 5-6 per week, mostly Toshiba Canvios, and I've just been buying them on Amazon. Have any of you ever found a place you can buy these by the case and save a few bucks? Even if it's $5 less per...

I think it might be nice to have a thread here for unusual head swap experiences that worked. Here's mine from today: Patient: WD2500AAJS-75M0A0 DCM: HANNNT2CH Date: 30 Aug 2009 Head map: 0, 1 Donor: WD3200AAKS-00L9A0 DCM: HBRNHT2CGN Date: 01 Nov 2009 Head map: 0, 1 Works perfectly and...

OK, so a week has gone by since switching to a much faster hosting company from my old hosting. Already I notice that now Google is constantly crawling my site and especially this forum. Just look at the crawl rate impact in the last week: The page loading time is way down as you can see in...

I'm not sure what (or who) happened here, but I just got in an SAS drive for recovery. Imaging went well, only a few bad sectors near the beginning but when I look at the data it's almost all zeros. Ran a scan in R-Studio and found some random data near the middle, but nothing useful. Then I...

I've got a drive here which I'm trying to smart hot swap due to SA damage. However when I try to write tracks to any donors they won't ID (the original drive does ID, but has issues). I'm pretty sure the issue is that the SA region seems to be non-standard for the model. For example: Donors...

My phone backs up all the pictures to google photos. I just find it funny the stuff it decides to animate together, like this dancing Toshiba HDD: You have to click it to see the animation.

Does anyone know if it's possible to move the location of a System file in the SA? I've never seen any way of doing this in any menus. I'm helping a guy with a drive that has an issue with both copies of system file 28, but I've got a good read of the file. Just that it won't read it from SA...

OK, after about a week of dealing with terrible support at my old hosting company the transfer of this site to the new hosting company is complete. Feel free to post till your heart is content :D , there won't be any lost content, and I think we even got all the old content 100%.

OK, site data was moved over last night but the SSL still isn't set up yet so I haven't pointed the DNS to the new host. So anything posted now won't be seen in a few days. Might as well ignore this forum for a few days. Also expect some downtime in between.

Just FYI the migration to the new hosting company has been endlessly delayed due to my current worthless hosting company. I'm hoping in the next 24hrs to get it done, however in the meantime between now and then anything you post in this forum will likely be lost. So please don't post any long...

I'm moving this site over to a new host. Just be aware that anything you post right now, might get deleted when the transfer is complete. It's being setup temp on the new host right now, and after it's done I'll redirect the domain. Likely to be some lost content in between.

I'm putting together my collection of LDRs from all the WD Marvell families. I know we need module 11, and for certain families like Diablo 3D, Diablo 3S, Sadle G6, Sadle 2D, Trails, Dragon, and Tressels we also need module 5C. Module 13 is also an overlay (transient I think), but I can't...

Buccaneer Family:

Here's Bobcat Family:

Here's Big Bear Family:

Here's Aztec PL Family:

I'm looking to order some new business cards, as I've been out for about a year now. How does this look: Thoughts?

Has anyone ever experimented with a way to rebuild a damaged or lost T-List using the P-List from a WD drive? It's a possibility I've often wondered about. If you look at the reports from both, you can see that all the tracks from the T-List are contained in the P-List as well. There's just...

It's official, I now own the name Data Medics in the USA: https://www.data-medics.com/data-recove ... trademark/ Now I can franchise it out to other people and start a bunch of satellite offices. Soon my plan to take over the data recovery world will be complete :D Anyone interested in a...

Here's the Atlantis ones:

I know for a while the Tapatalk Plugin wasn't working for this forum, but it seems to be resolved now after some updates. For any of you who like the mobile app version of the site.

I just want to warn anyone using the new feature of PC-3000 to check for heads donors, the preamp vendor / rev isn't actually read if you're only able to read from the PCB. Here's a picture of two reads from the same good drive (one attached to HDA and one just PCB alone): So just beware that...

I noticed this while running a test scan with GetDataBack Simple: But, I don't see XFS listed here: Anyone know if it actually supports XFS, or is it just saying that for fun?

I've added a new subsection of the FW & LDR requests forum where I'll be posting all available WD Marvell LDRs including those I extract from Donor Drives database files. It'll take some some time to complete so I'll probably only add a few families each week. After I post a family please feel...

I've been asked about this a few times, so I'm just posting this so I can point people here instead of trying to explain it each time. Here's how to verify if a drive is a compatible donor after you've already matched as closely as possible: Micro Jogs need to be within 300 of each other...

I know I've mentioned this in the past, but is thereanyone out there who's interested in doing some guest blogging on this site? Either for pay, links, fun, etc.? Only requirement is you'd have to have good English skills and know a little something about data recovery or digital storage...

Seems that they've done a nice update to this already very useful guide: http://www.donordrives.com/blog/matching-guide I definitely describes the DCM matching more accurately than before. Now they are on par with what I've been doing here.

Is anyone else getting an error now when you post a quick reply? The messages are still posting, but it's giving an error.

I've also added the feature where now you can simply highlight the text you want to quote, and a popup button will appear. This should make it much easier to multi-quote should the need arise. Sorry it took so long to add this, had to figure out how to make it work with the theme.

I've added a totally new posting system that has far more advanced formatting features to the forum. Now you can easily add more rich content, format your text however you'd like, embed and format graphics/videos/sound clips, etc. Please let me know if there's any issues If not then Enjoy...

Does anyone know if the model really matters for using an LDR so long as it's the same family and consolidated ROM version? Only reason I ask, is that I'm considering putting together a consolidated pack of ldr's for each family and not sure if I just need to do one of each version or one for...

Has anyone else been finding that the more recent Seagate DM cases that are coming in are becoming easier? I'm seeing a lot less catastrophic head failures and more and more that are just media cache or firmware issues. I'm actually starting to like these drives coming in now. What are you...

I remember seeing a post about a tool to easily short Seagate read channel, but now I can't seem to find it. Anyone know who it was that's selling those?

I have to admit this is a cool looking external: But, what I can't understand is that it still requires a separate wall wart power cable. Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't USB 3.1 be more than capable of powering up two SSDs? They only draw a couple watts.

I just noticed this controller: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagat ... 29289.html Not sure if it's new, but with Seagate and Sandforce working together we are all doomed. They will be impossible to recover. :o :shock: :( :cry:

OK, someone needs to explain to me what's going on here. Since when are they banning people for what others do on their forum? I don't even know what sheetal30shrama did or who he is.... can someone else explain? Why did I get banned?

Just updated the forum software. Please let me know if you experience any issues.

I'm thinking of clearing out all the track files in my collected resources, excluding current projects where I might still need them. Anyone know of a useful purpose to keep these tracks around? I know I've never used a track from another drive to do anything, just the modules. Hey! This is...

I don't know if anyone else was having issue attaching images, etc. I didn't realize that phpBB defaults to limit the total amount of uploaded files. I've raised the limit greatly, so shouldn't have any more issues with that for a while.

Here's an interesting case. Had an older Seagate IDE 7200.10 drive arrive today and the customer seemed quite certain the issue was PCB related. When I first plug it in I notice that the power connector is a bit twitchy, but with a little wiggling it does spin up fine (probably why they...

Can any of you guys do me a favor and rate this site on WOT: https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/data-medics.com I'm trying to get it where it shows green for those who use this plugin. Apparently it takes a few reviews before you go green. Not that I really care, but I've seen a few sites...

You may have noticed the little blue icon at the top of each post. It's for social sharing of threads. If you like something, please take a half second to click it. Will help others to find this forum. :D

OMG, can you say: "Worst role model ever!" I pulled this right from the UN homepage. Seems there will be an entire generation of kids around the world now with the word "Pink" written on the butt of their sweatpants. :shock:

Looks like Dolphin is trying to catch up to PC-3000 here: http://www.dolphindatalab.com/product/d ... equipment/ I'd be very interested to hear anyone's take on how well this system works, or how much it costs.

Does anyone know how to skip ahead and start imaging higher LBA's in MRT? It seems to always be grayed out as you can see here: I'm not used to MRT and helping out someone online here.

Anyone else sick to death of extremely over-moderated tech forums? You try to spend hours actually helping random people with data recovery issues, dealing with idiots who are giving aweful advice like "put it in the freezer", then you end up getting banned because you post a link to an article...

https://www.hgst.com/company/media-room ... th-in-data I think it's finally time that I'll have to start charging extra based on drive size. I just did two 8Tb Seagates, and now this. Unless the speed of imaging greatly increases, will have to start adding cost based on equipment time imaging...

I'm trying to figure out which bridge board was used to make this encryption sector: http://puu.sh/lHjl5/74a0ff2ef6.png Does anyone recognize which encryption chip this is? I don't have the drive locally, trying to help someone remote. It was found at sector: 2930272264

It's now been 27+ hours since I uploaded my video of destroying my UDMA card and still no activation or response to my ticket or email. So just beware that if you're doing this process too, it can take a while and you might be shut down for a few days. I thought when they said it'll be...

Here's my destruction video for the upgrade program: rv29_Rir988 It's a bittersweet feeling. This card and I have spent some time together, but I think the excitement of my new Express card wins out. Now I want to see your video! :D

I'm installing PC-3000 software and DE on my new express card system. I notice that you have an option to select where the "bin" folder goes which contains the program files. I definitely want the program itself to run on my SSD for faster performance and loading, but I know that the bin...

Has anyone tried yet upgrading their system to Windows 10 running one of the new PC-3000 boards? I'm just curious to hear if there's any major issues before I even consider the upgrade.

Are my eyes playing tricks on me: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1 ... uhs_i.html It looks like they are now selling 512Gb SD cards.... :o I'm seriously going to have to revisit my pricing for logical recoveries from flash media with these sizes. Just thinking about how many of...

This took me a few minutes to figure out a simple method to connect terminal to Maxtor desktop drives (haven't needed to in a while). So I figure I'll just post a picture for reference. I used the 3.5" Seagate Terminal Adapter and connected as seen below: Worked like a charm. Easier than...

I just ordered my PC-3000 Express card update yesterday. Built my new rig for it today: Specs: GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z97X Motherboard i5 4590 CPU RAIDMAX Vampire 1000W PSU IN WIN Full Tower Case Areca ARC-1880i RAID Controller 8x 4Tb HGST SAS Hard Drives in RAID 6 250Gb Samsung 850 EVO M.2...

This morning I come in to find my PC-3000 computer shut down, and I know I had left it on last night. Go to boot it up, just a few scary hard drive beeps and nothing but a black screen. Now I'm imaging it's drive on DDI hoping on a fresh drive it'll boot so I don't have to reinstall everything...

Now I need some advice from a data recovery old timer. Same day as I get in my first 8Tb for recovery I also get in a 420Mb drive for recovery (yes Mb not Gb). They actually brought in a supposedly good same model drive in case I need parts for it, but I can't seem to interface with it. I...

I just got in my first two 8Tb Seagate Archive drives for recovery. :o Two at once! I don't know whether to be excited, or freaked out. If anyone wants to pray for me, or offer any advice would be much appreciated. HAHA!

I've got an ARM Hitachi drive here that was a DIY special and is now missing the label. Customer doesn't know where it is and thinks it was thrown away. From the PCB I am able to pull the FW, Model Number, and Serial (also on bottom). But, I'm hoping to get a more specific Part No. and MLC as...

Just so you guys know, if I end up dead or missing this news article is the reason why: http://www.eastbayri.com/news/porn-reco ... -computer/ I knew it was bad when an IT person dropped the drive off, and a Police Sargent picked it back up after recovery.

Been working this out for a few days. Trying to make the forum blend better into the rest of my site. Also expect some other layout changes. I'm not removing any forums, but possibly re-arranging to make it easier to navigate. Let me know what you think of the new forum theme. :D Also, if...

Here's a little calculator I made in Excel that takes the first three of a modern Toshiba drive serial number and converts it to the date code: Enjoy! :D

I'm working on this drive that's acting very strangely. It's a Pharoah family Model: ST1500LM003 P/N: 9YH148-550 FW: CC9F S/N: Z11.... When it came in it spins up, sounds like a normal spin up, then just keeps spinning. In utility it ID's as: Model : ST_M13FQBL Serial : QNR_BFW Firmware ...

Looks like DeepSpar has a new more automated and less expensive tool coming out soon. www.rapidspar.com 4Iy9NQqC9Dg I hope this won't cut too much into the easy jobs when IT guys start getting a hold of them.

Is there anyone here who's a pro at understanding the mdadm --examine reports? Here's what I'm getting from the members of the array (each page is a different drive) Some things seem obvious: RAID 5 64Kb Stripe Size It looks to me like /dev/sdh went offline first. But, what's confusing to...