Early Diagnostics and warning signs
How do we know that a hard drive is having problems and could fail soon?
Is it possible to diagnose a failing drive or data recovery before its too late?
Archive for March, 2009
Early Diagnostics and warning signs
Thursday, March 19th, 2009Hard Drive Physical Components
Thursday, March 19th, 2009Hard Drive Physical Components
The hard drive itself consists of two main parts.
The mechanical part including the heads and disk assembly.
The PCB electronic board.
As these parts are physical they can be subject to failure and result in the need for hard drive data recovery.
The PCB is made from different components, each chip, resistor, fuse etc all have their own tasks and duties. Later in the week we will discuss the PCB more in depth. At this stage you should be aware that as this is the electronic circuitry of the hard drive it is subject to electrical failures.
Inside the hard drive we can see many more physical components. See fig 1 for the view inside a hard drive.
Firmware what is it?
Thursday, March 19th, 2009Firmware what is it?
Lets take a look at the PCB there are often several chips on a PCB but what do they do? Do they contain the firmware or is that resident on the hard drive? The IC chips on the logic card are nothing more than empty chips, they have to be programmed to deliver their functions and complete the circuit. Originally all hard drives stored firmware in the ROM, unfortunately this limited the code and functions of the hard drive. Currently the firmware is stored in the SA Service Area of the hard drive known to the manufacturer as a reserved area. The firmware is organized into modules and controlled by the manufacturers own operating system. The ROM chip nowadays contains minimal amount of code, some companies now have nothing more than the loader on the ROM chip.
Problems and Diagnostics of Seagate Drives
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009Common Problems and Diagnostics of Seagate data recovery.
U Series 5
Typical problems with this drive family are diode failures which affect the voice coil and spindle, and failure of the read/write channel.
Barracuda ATA II
This family tends to suffer from problems with the stabilizers of the spindle motor circuit either by burning or shorting out. The latching transistors of the read/write channel circuitry, the symptoms of which are the drive produces knocking at a frequency of 5Hz.
SP1654N Dead Drive
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009I got a Samsung SP1654N IDE drive in today which at first glance looks like any other IDE hard drive. The biggest head scratch is that when slaved into a secondary system, the system powers up normally, all looks good. On closer inspection of our slaved drive reveals that the disk is not spinning, not even a brrrrr or click. Someone call a external drive data recovery specialist!
The drive came from a external hard drive casing. This was tested and we found it to be faulty as well. We can say that the drive suffered from a intense power spike. This spike has caused damage to the external hard drive casing, the PCB of the hard drive and also the spindle motor of the hard disk drive.
Data Recovery Climates
Thursday, March 12th, 2009Geographic Based Data Recovery
There are many differences around the world in the data recovery field, they vary from manufacturer, distribution, problems and solutions.
As hard drives are manufactured the manufacturers need licenses to distribute and ship them overseas. Some countries may be ignored if there is no requirement for those models, if problems occur in those countries or maybe the cost of export is too high to make a good profit. As we travel around the world we will find that some countries do not have certain brands of hard drives (this is usually the case for many products not technology related too). In the UK the trade of hard drives is quite an open market we receive hard drives from all over the world, however in India they do not see many Hitachi drives. The exact reason for this is unknown, maybe they are out there but not many fail and arrive in the lab for recovery.
We cover all of the UK including London, South West London, Kingston, Teddington, New Malden, Surbiton, Twickenham, Wimbledon, Barnes, Chessington and Morden
We Specialise in the following brands:
