Laptop/ Notebook Data Recovery

Our society now has become fast paced and individuals feel the need to cope up thus the popularity of laptops. These machines allow individuals to carry out their daily tasks even when they are not at home or in the office. Most companies nowadays allow their employees to telecommute or bring their work at home. However, because laptops are mobile, the danger of data loss is higher compared to the desktop pc.
But if the worse has happened and you have already lost your files because you accidentally dropped your laptop, because of hard drive failure, accidental deletion, virus attacks and corruption, or physical damage from fire or other disasters, I suggest you seek professional help immediately.
No matter what brand it is we can recover data from your failed laptop hard drive.  We may fix the hard drive itself or retrieve files off of it. CompuRecovery offer specialist laptop data recovery services for 2.5" hard drives.
Yes we can recover data from drives where a head crash has physically damaged part of the platters. Our clean room environment allows us to access the airtight compartment of a hard drive and take care of failed internal components. In most cases, the recovery process demands rebuilding of the data using highly sophisticated techniques on the hex level.
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.

• Major and minor electronic problems
• Internal mechanical head (damaged heads, read / write errors, head misalignment Incorrect spin speed, motor and spindle related problems, problems related to the drive's fluid dynamic bearing technology)  
• ATA password protected hard drives

Generally, data recovery process for a desktop hard drive is rather the same compared to laptops. The only difference is quite obvious; a laptop’s hard drive is typically smaller and a bit more difficult to handle. Engineers would have to be more careful because one wrong move may bring all those important data down the drain. Please select your laptop data recovery company carefully, as often there is a small window of opportunity to recover the data, the correct techniques and resources must be applied to obtain a successful recovery.
Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, Seagate, Fujitsu and IBM are amongst the laptop hard drive manufacturers, however we are able to recover the data from all of these systems, and whatever the circumstances.
No matter whom the manufacturer of the laptop or notebook is, its hard disk will nearly always be either an IBM Travelstar, Hitachi DK23, Fujitsu or Toshiba hard drive.
With laptop hard drives data recovery we face the same problems as with their desktop counterparts, but because of their compact size and much greater density they also tend to have a few unique problems of their own.

• Impact damage  
• Inaccessible drives and partitions
• Virus /Malware
• Hard disk drive component wear and tear
• Hard disk  drive crash
• Fire, water, or other natural calamities including  your morning juice spilt  on a laptop
• Media surface contamination and damage
• Accidental format
• Accidental deletion of data

Understanding the specifics of the hard drive functioning and nature of possible failures:
Capacity
We can see the capacity in two aspects: the total capacity and the capacity of one disk. The whole capacity is made up of each disk capacity.
If we increase the disk capacity, we would not only improve the disk capacity and the speed of transmission, but also cut the cost down.
Rotate speed

Rotate speed is the speed disk rotate. It is measured by RPM (Round per Minute). The rotate speed of IDE hard disk is 5400RPM, 7200RPM etc.
Average Seek Time

The average seek time gives a good measure of the speed of the drive in a multi-user environment where successive read/write request are largely uncorrelated.
Ten ms is common for a hard disk and 200 ms for an eight-speed CD-ROM.
Average Latency

The hard disk platters are spinning around at high speed and the spin speed is not synchronized to the process that moves the read/write heads to the correct cylinder on a random access on the hard disk. Therefore, at the time that the heads arrive at the correct cylinder, the actual sector that is needed may be anywhere. After the actuator assembly has completed it’s seek to the correct track, the drive must wait for the correct sector to come around to where the read/write heads are located. This time is called latency. Latency is directly related to the spindle speed of the drive and such is influenced solely by the drive's spindle characteristics.
Conceptually, latency is rather simple to understand; it is also easy to calculate. The faster the disk is spinning, the quicker the correct sector will rotate under the heads, and the lower latency will be. Sometimes the sector will be at just the right spot when the search is completed, and the latency for that access will be close to zero. Sometimes the needed sector will have just passed the head and in this "worst case", a full rotation will be needed before the sector can be read. On average, latency will be half the time it takes for a full rotation of the disk.
Average Access Time

Access time is the metric that represents the composite of all the other specifications reflecting random performance positioning in the hard disk. As such, it is the best figure for assessing overall positioning performance, and you'd expect it to be the specification most used by hard disk manufacturers and enthusiasts alike. Depending on your level of cynicism then, you will either be very surprised or not surprised much at all, to learn that it is rarely even discussed. Ironically, in the world of CD-ROMs and other optical storage it is the figure that is universally used for comparing positioning speed. I am really not sure why this discrepancy exists.
Perhaps the problem is that access time is really a derived figure, comprised of the other positioning performance specifications. The most common definition is:
Access Time = Command Overhead Time + Seek Time + Settle Time + Latency
Data rates are often measured in megabits (million bits) or megabytes (million bytes) per second. These are usually abbreviated as Mbps and MBps, respectively.
Buffer Size (Cache)

A small fast memory holding recently accessed data, designed to speed up subsequent access to the same data. Most often applied to processor-memory access but also used for a local copy of data accessible over a network etc.
When data is read from, or written to, main memory a copy is also saved in the cache, along with the associated main memory address. The cache monitors addresses of subsequent reads to see if the required data is already in the cache. If it is (a cache hit) then it is returned immediately and the main memory read is aborted (or not started). If the data is not cached (a cache miss) then it is fetched from main memory and also saved in the cache.
The cache is built from faster memory chips than main memory so a cache hit takes much less time to complete than a normal memory access. The cache may be located on the same integrated circuit as the CPU, in order to further reduce the access time. In this case it is often known as primary cache since there may be a larger, slower secondary cache outside the CPU chip.
The most important characteristic of a cache is its hit rate - the fraction of all memory accesses which are satisfied from the cache. This in turn depends on the cache design but mostly on its size relative to the main memory. The size is limited by the cost of fast memory chips.
The hit rate also depends on the access pattern of the particular program being run (the sequence of addresses being read and written). Caches rely on two properties of the access patterns of most programs: temporal locality - if something is accessed once, it is likely to be accessed again soon and spatial locality - if one memory location is accessed then nearby memory locations are also likely to be accessed. In order to exploit spatial locality, caches often operate on several words at a time, a "cache line" or "cache block". Main memory reads and writes are whole cache lines.
When the processor wants to write to main memory, the data is first written to the cache on the assumption that the processor will probably read it again soon. Various different policies are used. In a write-through cache, data is written to main memory at the same time as it is cached. In a write-back cache it is only written to main memory when it is forced out of the cache.
If all accesses were writes then, with a write-through policy, every write to the cache would necessitate a main memory write, thus slowing the system down to main memory speed. However, statistically, most accesses are reads and most of these will be satisfied from the cache. Write-through is simpler than write-back because an entry that is to be replaced can just be over written in the cache as it will already have been copied to main memory whereas write-back requires the cache to initiate a main memory write of the flushed entry followed (for a processor read) by a main memory read. However, write-back is more efficient because an entry may be written many times in the cache without a main memory access.
When the cache is full and it is desired to cache another line of data then a cache entry is selected to be written back to main memory or "flushed". The new line is then put in its place. Which entry is chosen to be flushed is determined by a "replacement algorithm". Some processors have separate instruction and data caches. Both can be active at the same time, allowing an instruction fetch to overlap with a data read or write. This separation also avoids the possibility of bad cache conflict between say the instructions in a loop and some data in an array which is accessed by that loop.
Noise & Temperature

It comes from motor. So motor is the key to reduce the noise and temperature. If you can keep the temperature of hard disk down, then you can keep your hard disk effective.
Hard drive consists of platter, control circuit board and interface parts.
A hard disk is a sealed unit containing a number of platters in a stack. Hard disks may be mounted in a horizontal or a vertical position. In this description, the hard drive is mounted horizontally.
Electromagnetic read/write heads are positioned above and below each platter. As the platters spin, the drive heads move in toward the center surface and out toward the edge. In this way, the drive heads can reach the entire surface of each platter.
Making Tracks
On a hard disk, data is stored in thin, concentric bands. A drive head, while in one position can read or write a circular ring, or band called a track. There can be more than a thousand tracks on a 3.5-inch hard disk. Sections within each track are called sectors. A sector is the smallest physical storage unit on a disk, and is almost always 512 bytes (0.5 kB) in size.
The figure below shows a hard disk with two platters.
Figure 3-1 Parts of a Hard Drive

The structure of older hard drives (i.e. prior to Windows 95) will refer to a cylinder/ head/ sector notation. A cylinder is formed while all drive heads are in the same position on the disk. The tracks stacked on top of each other form a cylinder. This scheme is slowly being eliminated with modern hard drives. All new disks use a translation factor to make their actual hardware layout appear continuous, as this is the way that operating systems from Windows 95 onward like to work.
To the operating system of a computer, tracks are logical rather than physical in structure, and are established when the disk is low-level formatted. Tracks are numbered, starting at 0 (the outermost edge of the disk), and going up to the highest numbered track, typically 1023, (close to the center). Similarly, there are 1,024 cylinders (numbered from 0 to 1023) on a hard disk.
The stack of platters rotates at a constant speed. The drive head, while positioned close to the center of the disk reads from a surface that is passing by more slowly than the surface at the outer edges of the disk. To compensate for this physical difference, tracks near the outside of the disk are less-densely populated with data than the tracks near the center of the disk. The result of the different data density is that the same amount of data can be read over the same period of time, from any drive head position.
The disk space is filled with data according to a standard plan. One side of one platter contains space reserved for hardware track-positioning information and is not available to the operating system. Thus, a disk assembly containing two platters has three sides available for data. Track-positioning data is written to the disk during assembly at the factory. The system disk controller reads this data to place the drive heads in the correct sector position.
Sectors and Clusters
A sector, being the smallest physical storage unit on the disk, is almost always 512 bytes in size because 512 is a power of 2 (2 to the power of 9). The number 2 is used because there are two states in the most basic of computer languages - on and off.
Each disk sector is labeled using the factory track-positioning data. Sector identification data is written to the area immediately before the contents of the sector and identifies the starting address of the sector.

Elementary knowledge of hard disk - Logical organization of hard disk

The optimal method of storing a file on a disk is in a contiguous series, i.e. all data in a stream stored end-to-end in a single line. As many files are larger than 512 bytes, it is up to the file system to allocate sectors to store the file's data. For example, if the file size is 800 bytes, two 512 k sectors are allocated for the file. A cluster is typically the same size as a sector. These two sectors with 800 bytes of data are called two clusters.

They are called clusters because the space is reserved for the data contents. This process protects the stored data from being over-written. Later, if data is appended to the file and its size grows to 1600 bytes, another two clusters are allocated, storing the entire file within four clusters.
Figure 3-2 Sectors and Clusters

If contiguous clusters are not available (clusters that are adjacent to each other on the disk), the second two clusters may be written elsewhere on the same disk or within the same cylinder or on a different cylinder - wherever the file system finds two sectors available.

A file stored in this non-contiguous manner is considered to be fragmented. Fragmentation can slow down system performance if the file system must direct the drive heads to several different addresses to find all the data in the file you want to read. The extra time for the heads to travel to a number of addresses causes a delay before the entire file is retrieved.
Cluster size can be changed to optimize file storage. A larger cluster size reduces the potential for fragmentation, but increases the likelihood that clusters will have unused space. Using clusters larger than one sector reduces fragmentation, and reduces the amount of disk space needed to store the information about the used and unused areas on the disk. Most disks used in personal computers today rotate at a constant angular velocity. The tracks near the outside of the disk are less densely populated with data than the tracks near the center of the disk. Thus, a fixed amount of data can be read in a constant period
of time, even though the speed of the disk surface is faster on the tracks located further away from the center of the disk.
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.
Low level manufacturer knowledge of all hard drives and systems allow CompuRecovery to recover data, where other companies or systems have failed.
Hard drive technology is a very fast pacing area of the IT market. The number of bits that fit onto each platter continues to increase. Bits are getting smaller and smaller, making for greater storage capacity.

IBM / Hitachi laptop hard disk drive failure - Data recovery sheet:
Travelstar was manufactured for a quite long time by IBM. Hitachi now continues to make the Travelstar.
IC25N020ATCS04, ICN020ATDA04 (both 20 GB), IC25N030ATCS04, IC25N030ATDA04 (both 30 GB), other IC25 series, DJSA series, DARA series are very common.
IC25N060ATMR04 (60 GB), IC25N080ATMR04 (80 GB), and later models beginning 'HT'  HTS548040M9AT00, HTE726060M9AT00 etc.

• 
  Laptop will fail to boot and the drive will not be recognized in the BIOS, regular "clicking" noise will be heard from the drive
  
• Laptop will fail to boot and the drive will not be recognized in the BIOS. No sound will be heard from the drive - not even the sound of platter rotation, the drive will appear to be still

CompuRecovery can perform a full recovery from Travelstar that fail with the above or other symptoms.
The Hitachi DK23 family has a number of models such as DK23AA, DK23BA, DK23CA, DK23DA, and DK23EA - all with various capacities.

• At power up, the drive will not be recognized by the computer. Also, a regular clicking or ticking noise will be heard coming from the hard disk,
• The drive will be recognized by the overall performance of the PC will be impacted and operation (particularly disk based operations such as file opening, copying etc) will be very slow. The machine may also hang.

DK23BA-60 (6 Gob), DK23BA-10 (10 GB), DK23BA-15 (15 GB), DK23BA-20 (20 GB)
The Hitachi DK23BA family of laptop hard disk drives has a unique failure. This failure symptom is only apparent on the BA family of the DK23.
Manufactured in great quantities, the Travelstar was made for a long time by IBM. Hitachi now continues to make the Travelstar.
IC25N020ATCS04, ICN020ATDA04 (both 20 GB), IC25N030ATCS04, IC25N030ATDA04 (both 30 GB), other IC25 series, DJSA series, DARA series etc.
IC25N060ATMR04 (60Gb), IC25N080ATMR04 (80Gb), and later models beginning 'HT': HTS548040M9AT00, HTE726060M9AT00 etc.

• 
  Laptop will fail to boot and the drive will not be recognized in the BIOS, regular "clicking" noise will be heard from the drive
  
• Laptop  will fail to boot and the drive will not be recognized in the BIOS. No sound will be heard from the drive - not even the sound of platter rotation, the drive will appear to be still

Compurecovery can perform a full recovery from Travelstar that fail with the above symptoms.

Fujitsu laptop hard disk drive failure

Current Drives:
MHV family: e.g. MHV2080BS, MHV2080AS, MHV2120AH, MHV2120BH SATA, MHV2160BT SATA
MHW family: e.g. MHW2080AT, MHW2160BH SATA, MHW2160BJ SATA
MHX family: e.g. MHX2300BT SATA
Discontinued Drives:
MHM family: MHM2060AT, MHM2100AT, MHM2150AT, MHM2200AT
MHN family: MHN2100AT, MHN2150AT, MHN2200AT, MHN2300AT
MHR family: MHR2010AT, MHR2020AT, MHR2030AT, MHR2040AT
MHS family: MHS2020AT, MHS2030AT, MHS2040AT, MHS2060AT
MHT family: MHT2020AT, MHT2030AT, MHT2040AT, MHT2060AT, MHT2040AH, MHT2060AH
MHU family: MHU2100AT

• A deterioration of performance is noticed shortly before the hard disk fails completely; this may happen over a period of days or in some cases minutes or seconds before the disk fails completely.
• A distinctive whining sound; subsequent attempts to power up may also result in a sound although this is normally too quiet to be audible through the laptop casing.
• It is also common to hear the sound of the motor attempt to spin up, fail, and then retry a number of times.

CompuRecovery is able to perform a full data recovery on Toshiba laptop series hard drives with specific motor failure

Seagate Momentus laptop hard disk drive failure - Data recovery information

• Momentus 5400.2, Momentus 5400.3, Momentus 5400.4
• Momentus 7200.1, Momentus 7200.2

Seagate's Momentus drive is a recent addition into the laptop hard disk market and comes in capacities from 30 GB to 160 GB. As their popularity increases, we are beginning to see more of them fail and come in for data recovery.

• 
  Laptop will fail to boot and the drive will not be recognized in the BIOS, regular "clicking" noise will be heard from the drive
  
• Laptop will fail to boot and the drive will not be recognized in the BIOS. No sound will be heard from the drive - not even the sound of platter rotation, the drive will appear to be still

As with all laptop hard disks, there are numerous causes of these problems, but the symptoms are often the same.
Typically if you have a Samsung hard drive, it will be from their 'SpinPoint' range.
Common failure symptoms relating to all types of Samsung laptop hard disks include -

• The laptop will not boot and the drive will not be recognized when the PC is switched on
• The drive will emit a ticking / clicking / knocking sound when the PC is switched on & the computer will hang. This symptom is indicative of an internal mechanical problem on the hard disk, fortunately, Data Clinic are nearly always able to recover the data in these situations.
• The PC will start to run slowly - various file related actions such as opening and copying files will take a long time to complete or not complete at all. Problems of this type are usually indicative of media degradation on the hard disk platter surface - this is often referred to as a bad sector problem. CompuRecovery is often able to fully recover drives with these errors using our own in-house developed data recovery hardware tool "EMAC".

Data Recovery from Western Digital laptop hard disk drives

Known by their family name of ”Scorpio", Western Digital's laptop hard disk drives are available with either an IDE or SATA interface, a 2Mb or 8Mb cache, and in capacities varying from 40Gb up to 120Gb. Western Digital are a rather recent entrant into the world of laptop hard drive suppliers. Scorpio drives have only really been available since 2005 and hence they tend to be found in notebook computers manufactured after this date.
If your laptop was manufactured before this date and has a hard disk problem you will probably find the hard drive it contains is an IBM / Hitachi Travelstar or a Toshiba laptop model.
So far, the Scorpio drives we've seen come in for recovery at CompuRecovery have failed with the common laptop hard drive failure symptoms i.e.

• The drive will no longer be recognized when the laptop is powered on. Additionally a regular ticking noise may be heard from the hard drive, or
• The drive will be recognized but the computer will run slowly and access times to files and folders will be impaired. Sometimes the machine will hang and a ticking noise be heard from the hard drive.

As with all laptop hard disks, there are numerous causes of these problems, but the symptoms are often the same. CompuRecovery is able to perform a full recovery of data from Western Digital Scorpio hard disk drives.

• Dell laptops / notebooks: Inspiron, Latitude
• Sony laptops / notebooks: Vaio series
• Toshiba laptops / notebooks: Satellite Pro, Tecra, Qosmio, Portégé
• IBM laptops / notebooks: Thinkpad series
• Compaq laptops / notebooks: Tecra, Armada, Presario
• HP laptops / notebooks: NC series, NX series
• Acer laptops / notebooks: Aspire
• Fujitsu Siemens: Amilo, Lifebook, Stylistic, Celcius
• Asus laptops / notebooks: A series, M series, S series, W 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.

CompuRecovery stores an image of your laptop data recovery for 14 days to verify that you have all the necessary data from your laptop hard drive.
Call CompuRecovery and talk your problem through with us on 866 4245123, or get a quote.