Data Recovery from Desktop Hard Drives

How many times did you hear your colleague remind you to back up those files? Many times already! But did you listen? No. A thing such as data loss can never happen to you. Not with your brand new, shiny pc.
But apparently you were wrong. The worse has happened and you didn’t expect it. You lost all your data.
It has also been observed in our desktop data recovery labs where clients open hard drives, 'just to see', this drive is probably now unrecoverable, never open a hard drive unless you have access to clean room technology.
CompuRecovery guarantee to recover your data or there is no fee.
CompuRecovery can recover data from all desktop systems, and manufacturers such Dell, Time, Tiny, Sony, HP, Fujitsu Siemens, Sun, clone or unbranded systems, CompuRecovery cover all systems.
CompuRecovery service includes rescuing of lost data from hard drives (and other media including DVD, RAID, backup tapes, disk arrays, floppies, CD-ROM, iPods and other MP3 players, digital camera media and removable cartridges) that is caused by hard drive failure/crash, corruption, human error, viruses, damage from power surges, blue screen of death
CompuRecovery will diagnose your media within 24 HRS of receipt, a report will the be given to you either verbally or via email, this recovery report will allow you to make an informed decision on what data you require, that way you only pay for desktop data recovery files that you require., deleted partitions, disk reformatting, flood, smoke, fire or other natural disasters.
You will be able to decide on recovery options only if you know what exactly is wrong with the disk. There are a few things you can do which would give you a reasonable idea about the nature of the hard disk problem.

• Firmware Corruption / Damage to the firmware zone
• Electronic Failure
• Mechanical Failure
• Logical Corruption

1. Firmware Corruption / Damage to the firmware zone

In hard disk drives, firmware is the software code that controls, and is embedded in, the physical hard drive hardware.
Hard drive firmware is typically found on a flash memory chip on the hard drive PCB. Often the firmware will need to access various drive unique parameters from the hard disk platter surface during operation to ensure the correct functioning of the hard drive at all times.
The firmware controls all aspects of the internal hard drive operation -

• When a hard drive is powered on, it is the firmware that is responsible for correctly configuring the hard drive and putting it in a ready state that will then allow the host PC to load the Operating System.
• During the operation of the hard drive it is the firmware that ensures the correct operation of the hard drive, allowing it to correctly interact with other components on the system
• When the hard drive is powered down, a shutdown sequence is executed by the firmware that ensures the hard drive powers down correctly so that it will operate successfully the next time it is powered on.

Hard disk drive failure due to firmware problems
There are a number of hard drives that have apparent firmware issues. Damage is sustained to either the firmware code itself, or to some of the hard drive parameters located on the hard disk platter surface that are accessed by the firmware.
Common Symptoms

• The hard disk will spin up when powered on, but be incorrectly recognized / not recognized at all by the computer
• The hard disk will spin up & be recognized correctly by the computer but the system will then hang during the boot process

Actions to take

• Recovering data from hard drives with firmware failure requires low level reprogramming / manipulation of the hard drive. It is not possible for a PC repair shop to do this. CompuRecovery has our own equipment that allows us to successfully recover data from hard drives with firmware faults. We receive firmware updates from all major hard drive manufacturers on a regular basis.
• Corruption within the logical system can create challenges for data recovery engineers, missing FAT or MFT data can render the drive un useable, again any modifications here without the correct understanding of file structure can yield very serious consequences, please leave this area to the experts who will be pleased to assist you.

During the startup sequence, the hard drive will spin up but the computer will often hang in the BIOS and not proceed any further. The BIOS will identify the hard drive as one of the following:

Maxtor Ares64

Maxtor Athena

Maxtor Calypso

Maxtor Falcon

Maxtor Gala

Maxtor N40P

Maxtor Nike

Maxtor Proxima

Maxtor Rigel

Maxtor Romulus

 
Data recovery from Western Digital drives with firmware corruption
Western Digital Caviar models (WD...AB, WD...BB, WD...JB), where '...' are various numeric combinations e.g.
WD400JB, WD800JB, WD1200JB, WD1600JB, WD2000JB, WD2500JB, WD3000JB, WD3200JB
WD200BB, WD400BB, WD800BB, WD1200BB, WD1600BB, WD200BB, WD2500BB
At power on the hard drive will often

• Fail to be recognized by the PC BIOS when the computer is powered on
• No obvious failure noises
• An error message informing the user that the PC can not find the hard disk will then be generated and the system will halt.

An apparent firmware corruption is responsible for the failure of the hard drive. What if I have one of these drives but the symptoms are different? This is quite possible, they are still prone to all the other problems hard disks suffer from i.e. Mechanical failure, logical failure, bad sectors etc

Data Recovery from Fujitsu hard disk drives

There are apparent problems with the following Fujitsu desktop hard disk model numbers: MPG3102AT, MPF3102AT, MPG3102AH and MPF3102AH (all 10GB), MPG3204AT, MPF3204AT, MPG3204AH and MPG3204AT (all 20 GB), MPG3307AT, MPF3307AT, MPG3307AH and MPF3307AH (all 30 GB), MPG3409AT, MPF3409AT, MPG3409AH and MPF3409AH (all 40 GB).
These Fujitsu drives will in many cases be working perfectly before then failing suddenly. They will not be recognized by the BIOS and sometimes the BIOS may identify them with nonsense information. You may see an error message telling you of a disk boot failure and also that your operating system can not be found.
There are a variety of opinions as to the root cause of this failure. Fortunately, failed drives are often repairable.
Under no circumstances should you attempt to swap the controller board on one of these faulty drives with one from a working drive. IT WILL NOT WORK. This is because the information held on the failed drive is unique to each drive. Changing the controller board may very well cause a mechanical failure and render your recoverable data unrecoverable.

2. Electronic Failure

Electronic failure usually relates to problems on the controller board of the actual hard disk. The computer may suffer a power spike or electrical surge that knocks out the controller board on the hard disk making it undetectable to the BIOS.

• The hard disk will not spin up when the drive is powered on - it will appear dead & not be recognized by the computer

• CompuRecovery can recover data from all types of electrical hard drive failure.

Although electronic failures can happen to any type of hard disk, we find that Quantum Fireball drives are particularly susceptible to power spikes and quite often it's possible to see visible electrical burn damage around one of the chips on the controller board. Usually, the data on the hard disk has not suffered any damage and a 100% data recovery is possible. Quantum Fireball series, Western Digital drives, Maxtor drives, Fujitsu MPG and MPF series.

3. Mechanical Failure

Mechanical hard disk failures are those which develop on components internal to the hard disk itself. Often as soon as an internal component goes faulty the data on the hard disk will become inaccessible.

• When powered on, the hard drive will immediately begin to make a regular clicking sound

• Recovering data from hard drives with mechanical failure requires the drive to be worked on in a clean room as the drive has to be taken apart and investigated in lab conditions. CompuRecovery have a fully equipped Class 100 clean room which we use to recover drives with mechanical problems.

Do not be tempted to open a hard disk if you suspect a mechanical fault: there is nothing you will be able to do and you will contaminate the internal clean air environment. There is also a good chance that during this process you will destroy any chance that we have of successfully recovering the data.
Providing a Clean Air and Anti Static Environment for hard disk data recoveries
Invasive Hard Drive Repair
Invasive hard disk repair and recovery procedures require work to be taken care of in a clean air and static-free environment.
This type of repair is necessary when internal mechanical damage to the hard disk has occurred (for example - a head fault. Common symptom: ticking noise coming from the hard disk) and it therefore becomes necessary to open the hard drive to repair.

• ISO 5 (Class 100) HEPA filtered closed clean air environment - Constant cleaned and circulated airflow
• Dissipative flooring, clothing and monitoring
• Coved skirting
• Coated tooling and equipment
• Ionizer

This facility allows our staff to work on your hard drive in the correct recovery and repair environment, greatly increasing the likelihood of a successful data recovery.
A head crash occurs when the read / write heads of the hard disk collide with the disk's rotating platter surface. Frequently this causes physical damage to both the heads and the hard disk media.
Head crashes are caused by dust or contamination inside the hard disk casing, or by the drive receiving a sudden jolt or shock.
Head crashes vary in severity. However, some head crashes are mild and most of the data can be recovered.
Clean rooms are required in the manufacturer of hard drive media as particles entering the disk enclosure may cause damage to the surface of the media and render the product unreliable or useless in the worst case.
Modern hard media are designed with GMR (Giant Magneto Resistive) head technology which ‘flies' at a height of 1 micron or less a dust particle typically would be 50 microns in size.
Contrary to popular belief the media is not totally sealed as the device would cease to function as it was designed there is a semi sealed breather hole which allows for the correct air volume inside the cavity.
Class 100 cleanrooms are designed to never allow more than 100 particles (0.5 microns or larger) per cubic foot of air.
Class 10 Cleanrooms; have been designed to exceed the above standards to no more than 350 particles of 0.1 microns in size.

4. Logical Errors

Often the easiest and the most difficult problems to deal with, logical errors can range from simple things such as an invalid entry in a file allocation table to truly horrific problems such as the corruption and loss of the file system on a severely fragmented drive.
Logical errors are different to the electrical and mechanical problems above as there is usually nothing 'physically' wrong with the disk, just the information on it. They are the easiest ones to fix.
Hard disk interfaces
Hard disks also come in several flavors such as IDE (actually ATA), SCSI and SATA, as do optical drives. ATA is the most common interface used today. SCSI disks can usually be found on servers.
IDE
Integrated Drive Electronics, more commonly called by its acronym IDE, is an interface for hard drives. IDE is a marketing term; the real standard is called ATA.
EIDE (Enhanced IDE) or ATA-2 was later developed and increased transfer speed, added 32-bit transactions and DMA support.
ATA
ATA stands for Advanced Technology Attachment. The ATA -term is commonly used interchangeably with IDE. The older and more common parallel ATA (P-ATA) is currently being replaced by serial ATA (SATA).
Most PCs have two IDE controllers on the motherboard. One IDE controller can support two devices, so four storage devices is usually the maximum. Parallel ATA interface uses ribbon cables with 40 -pin connectors to connect the hard drives to the motherboard. The cable has usually three connectors. Of these one is connected to the motherboard and the rest two are left for hard drives. If two hard drives are connected to the same controller, one must be defined as master and the other one as slave. This is done with jumpers.

ATA-2 is the real standard for what is widely known as EIDE. ATA-2 introduced higher speed data transfer modes: PIO Modes 3 and 4 plus Multiword DMA Mode 1 and 2. These modes allow the ATA interface to run data transfers up to about 16MB/second.
SATA
Serial ATA, also known as SATA or S-ATA, is a bus used to communicate between the CPU and internal storage devices such as hard drives and optical drives. It is designed to eventually replace the ATA (also known as IDE) bus. Traditional ATA is beginning to be referred to as Parallel ATA, P-ATA, or PATA to avoid confusion.
The main difference between SATA and PATA is in the cabling. SATA does away with the master/slave relationship of PATA (hence the difference in names), as well as PATA's ungainly ribbon cables. Instead, SATA has much slimmer and easier to manage cables, which will enable better airflow through cases. The connectors are keyed, preventing connectors from being plugged upside down. Truly native SATA drives will have different power connectors also.
A third advantage of SATA is hot plugging.
Currently, SATA has a transfer rate of 150 MB/s, which is only 17 MB/s more than standard PATA. However, with the introduction of SATA II, this is expected to go up to 300 MB/s, with 600 MB/s being released sometime around 2007. The faster bus isn't expected to affect performance in the short term, since hard drive performance is usually bottlenecked by the moving parts of the drive.
During the transitional period before true native SATA drives are released, most SATA drives actually have onboard PATA controllers, which connect to SATA by a bridge. This generally causes a 30-50% performance drop. Also, PATA power connectors are still being used.
DMA
DMA (Direct Memory Access) is a function of the memory bus in the computer that lets connected devices like hard disks transfer data to the memory without the intervention of the CPU, thus speeding up the transfer. This is superior to the way PIO works.
There are two distinct types of direct memory access, DMA and bus mastering DMA. The plain DMA relies on the DMA controller on the motherboard to grab the system bus and transfer the data. In bus mastering DMA all this is done by the logic on the interface card itself. Bus mastering allows the hard disk and memory to work without relying on the old DMA controller built into the system, or needing any support from the CPU.
USB
USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a hardware bus using a serial protocol used by many different hardware devices and supported in most computers/mainboards. Originally developed by Compaq, Intel, NEC and Microsoft. It allows many devices to be connected to the bus at the same time; the theoretical maximum is 127 devices. The maximum data transfer bandwidth is about 12Mbit/s (USB2.0 supports 480 Mbit/sec).
Firewire is a less known alternative to USB that (at its time) was better than USB for media related tasks. As of USB2 there have been significant increases, specifically more bandwidth.
SCSI
SCSI - Small Computer System Interface. Pronounced "skuzzy". It's a specification for a hardware interface for connecting devices such as hard disks and scanners to a computer.
Most PCs have an ATA (IDE) bus instead of SCSI for connecting internal hard disks. SCSI is seen more often in servers, as it tends to be faster and more reliable (though more expensive). Another advantage of SCSI controller is that it requires only one IRQ and can handle usually at least 7 devices whereas ATA can handle only 2.
Typically, you put a SCSI card in your computer, and then connect internal hard disks with a ribbon cable to some connector on the card. Also, the card will have an external connector which you might also be using simultaneously.
Fiber Channel
Fiber Channel Hard Disk Drive
The Enterprise Virtual Array supports any combination of five different Fiber Channel Hard Disk Drives (HDD) with multiple capacity points and two different rotational speeds. Three drive capacity points are supported at 36 GB, 72 GB, and 146 GB. Two rotational speeds are supported at 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM.
The following individual drive capacity/rotational speed combinations are available:
146GB 10,000 RPM Fiber Channel HDD
72GB 15,000 RPM Fiber Channel HDD
72GB 10,000 RPM Fiber Channel HDD
36GB 15,000 RPM Fiber Channel HDD
36GB 10,000 RPM Fiber Channel HDD
Five different Fiber Channel HDDs for the Enterprise Virtual Array provides tremendous flexibility to the target customer base by allowing mixing and matching of capacity and performance to application needs. Application areas seen as potential markets include OLTP, ERP, and any other applications requiring large amounts of online storage
IEEE
Also called Firewire. It is a less known alternative to USB that (at its time) was better then USB for media related tasks. As of USB2 there have been significant increases, specifically more bandwidth.
You have come to the right place. Our success rate is typically above 90% and our charges are very reasonable for the effort involved.
Please never attempt to repair or recover the drive your self, this may render the drive or worse, the data unrecoverable, desktop data recovery requires a unique methodology and equipment to allow access to vital sub systems, and logical user data, many free or downloadable software available from the internet will not help, as in a physical issue, CompuRecovery will make temporary repairs to your hard drive, and then make an exact clone bit by bit of your media, and then work on this, thus ensuring the best possible chance of desktop data recovery.
A copy of your data will reside on our recovery server for 14 days, this allows you time to verify that your data is intact, following this, the data will be destroyed to DOD5220-M, thus ensuring your privacy and confidentiality is assured.

Call CompuRecovery and talk your problem through with us on 866-424-5123, or get a quote and we'll call you back