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Yeah, I got one or two in that were APFS already. So they're showing up. One was encrypted, so it was fortunate that MacOS was able to mount it fine after imaging. I haven't really needed to use R-Explorer for APFS yet, so I can't speak to how well it works. I suspect it's pretty limited to...

Ah, then this is a MacOS High Sierra issue most likely. The disk is probably APFS formatted, not HFS+. Upgrade your Mac workstation to the latest OS and see some magic happen. :D Or try R-Explorer since that supposedly supports APFS so long as it's not encrypted.

+1 to that. I'd try finding a better matched donor. Same model number and preferably the same MLC.

3084 bad sectors shouldn't lead to only getting a RAW recovery result. Two questions for you: 1. What programs have you tried? I'd usually recommend R-Explorer or Data Rescue 4/5 for HFS+. 2. Are you certain it was never formatted? By yourself or possibly by the customer before it came to...

Since this thread woke back up, I ended up buying one of these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/PL2303-USB-UAR ... 2749.l2649 It works well for all the regular PC-3000 speeds that I've tried. I haven't tried the faster speeds it supports yet, but that's only because I haven't spent the time to test...

There's no need to manually spam in a signature link to your homepage. Once you have enough approved posts you can put a link in your actual signature. But, you've got to have enough posts.

An image has no advantage over a clone for data recovery purposes. Besides, you can always make an image later from the clone if you'd like. You can attempt to re-read the previously unread sectors by using the -r followed by a number and using the same log file. So you'd do something like...

On that note, perhaps even just incorporating the features of HDDSuperTool into the HDDSuperClone GUI as a part of the pro version would be nice.

A dirty table was the least of your concerns. It's the dirty air in the room that's the problem. Bit particles, the ones you see and can wipe off, are probably too big to be a problem anyway. Those would spin off. It's the particles small enough to wedge in between the sliders and platter...

Don't quit your day job. Stick to web design. That's my advice based on this video.

To do that you'd need to read the ROM code. Tools like PC-3000 can put the drive into boot ROM code mode and read the ROM, but I don't know of a manual way to do that. It's something I've been hoping to research one day, but haven't had the time.

A jpeg that doesn't open after data recovery is usually because the wrong data was recovered. Either because the data was overwritten or its reading in the wrong place for the data. Fixing it is generally the wrong idea. Recovering it correctly is the course of action needed. Sent from my...

Because running chkdsk was the worst thing you could have done. Why bother to ask advice on a forum if you're just going to do your own stupid stuff anyway? Now your recovery just became a whole lot more complicated. Why not just douse the drive in Gasoline and light a match? It'll have...

Try specifying the full path of the log file. Use a command like: ddrescue -f /dev/sdb /dev/sdc home/users/Desktop/logfile.txt Also, it'll create the log file on its own. You shouldn't create one for it or that'll cause confusion to the program. Also, bear in mind that Linux is always case...

You can see the little glowie dot on the heads in this picture they posted on the seagate blog:

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...

Listen, SPAM isn't strictly prohibited here. You're free to post links and information about your company freely here. However, we do expect meaningful interaction, not just SPAMMY sales pitch dumps like this above post. If you keep making posts like this, you'll be quickly banned here. If...

The program that "opens" that file is the original data recovery program that created that file. It's an internal use file, and FYI it doesn't contain your data. It's just the results file of what was found in the scan. The actual data is all still on the original drive.

What's the consolidated ROM version? I'm pretty sure PC-3000 calls this family Sabre58 although module C5 clearly does say Unicorn.

Those two files are just the list of file names and the directory tree of the file/folder system. The actual data is still on the original media until you save it somewhere through the software.

Yeah, I think the official names are the ones assigned by WD which are found in C5 typically. I'd guess that in some cases a different family utility works just fine so Ace doesn't bother to create a new utility but just sets it to identify it as the other one instead.

Are you sure you didn't cook the replacement PCB in the transfer? I've done that a few times (blown a small component off there) and it'll have you chasing your tail for hours. Quick digital write to a new PCB, problem solved.

What?!?!?! I've never heard of Palmer family...did they name a family after me? :lol: Any chance I could see a copy of module C5 from it?

I'm thinking it's something more to this effect too.

Yeah, I'll admit, you were right in this one case. Even though there's no logical explanation based on the case info.

Here you go: Different model, but same family and same FW version. So it should work for most if not all modules.

So, this case continues to not make sense based on what the customer describes, but I've solved it regardless. So, after getting in a perfect match donor drive with same PCB, same FW, same P/N, etc. and putting the donor PCB on the drive does spin up. In terminal this is what I'm getting: DSA...

Anytime. :D

Here you go:

I think relay hardware is going to be a requirement if you plan to go into the $300+ price range. But, it could be something as simple as having it scripted to use an arduino board doing the switching. It could be sold as a separate addon kit along with with the necessary cabling. Sent from...

No, nothing about the drop is likely to affect the PCB and PCB failure is very uncommon on these. Ultimately the PCB will likely need to be replaced from the USB one to a SATA one, but that requires transferring the ROM code and handle the built-in encryption that most of these drives employ.

Unless you've got access to some professional data recovery tools like PC-3000 there may not be much you can do. At the very least the drive probably has bad sectors combined with a firmware glitch, commonly referred to as the WD slow responding bug, preventing it from mounting. It might even...

Did you block SA access in ROM? It could be that it's partially loading the SA.

LDR's can sometimes be finicky. I've seen before where I had to try a few different ones from the same ROM revision before one finally worked. I'm thinking it may be related to firmware updates done to certain drives perhaps.

Confirmed! Sabre 53 and Sabre 58 are cross-compatible for heads. :D

I do the same thing too. I'm just thinking that if you're going to make a pro version of the software as a GUI it should have a complete feature set. People buying this may want to have lower level techs, interns, whoever use it to clone/wipe drives who they wouldn't trust having command line...

Just because your computer guy couldn't get files from it doesn't mean it's unrecoverable by a professional lab. Might only cost a few hundred dollars depending on where you're at. As to the external drive reformatted for mac, it's likely that a partial recovery can be done. But, just know...

How soon do you think it'll be able to support using a null device as the source so we can use it to erase drives? I see the option there, but it gives an error about no source when I try to use it.

Yeah, I've got to bring one in. Apparently, I don't have any close matches to this one despite the fact that I've done recovery on several perfect matches. Probably killed all my donors and haven't put all the PCBs into inventory.

Try blocking SA access in ROM, then upload LDR again. If that works, do slow responding fix, unblock SA access and reboot. Done!

I should probably play with DRE more. I only ever use DDI 4 for the slow imaging cases to just keep them off my PC-3000 but I rarely use DRE at all. I mostly just keep my right eye on the monitor across the room to see if it.

If you ever get a more complicated RAID and need a minute of remote help let me know. I love RAID cases for some odd reason.

Yeah, they definitely would. :lol:

OK, I'm just finally getting back to this project after finishing up some more urgent cases. Here's what I get in terminal: ActiveFW : 00 FWVer : 0001DDR detected:32MB DW SIPC status: 00000081 SR Can't say I've ever seen this one before. I believe the next work (where it says SR) should...

Perhaps, I wouldn't know I've never really looked into it. If they did discontinue it perhaps they'll make it open source one day.

Then for that you'll want DeepSpar's Operations Server: http://www.deepspar.com/DeepSparOperati ... rview.html

I hope you don't mind, but I'm moving this topic to the RAID Recovery Form.

Yeah, I pretty much always build RAID 10 as a RAID 0. The first step (after cloning all the disks) is usually to figure out which drives likely were the offline ones. A quick check of the S.M.A.R.T. info will usually tell you which ones were the problem disks. Next, you find out which drives...

Happy to help :D R-Studio is usually easier to work with when it's a file system that it supports. I like how R-Studio allows you to play around with RAID settings on the fly and see the results. Plus R-Studio has the tab to see all files listed by date. So you can try it each way with each...

Here's 01.55B. I think the consolidated ROM version is still just 0010055 regardless so the LDR is likely the same. http://gofile.me/6nc9a/iZsPgwb2p I haven't yet figured out how to extract a full set of modules from a PCR file. I can extract one file at a time using PC-3000, but there's no...

How are you assembling the RAID 10? You should just find your mirror sets, then take one from each set and assemble it as a RAID 0. Then once you find the settings, you'll just have to figure out if any drives are out of date through swapping in and out the other drives and re-assembling it...

Here you go: http://gofile.me/6nc9a/bNbu7Q9Fg It's from a 1Tb but it won't matter for LDR.

As I said in the original post, the drive stopped spinning after it was dropped. Super unlikely that it's related to the PCB.

Location of SA can vary depending on what's specified in NVRAM. Very likely your patient drive has damage in an area of the SA that isn't used by the donor drive so it's not attempting to read there (thus not clicking). Once you move the NVRAM over it's again trying to read the damaged spot...

Not yet. I just took a five-minute look before leaving for the day yesterday. I'll probably spend some time with it on Monday. I did notice that the ATA indicators just stay at BSY though.

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...

I highly doubt that. Your junk software has been spammed to death on this and every other forum. Always by people pretending to be end users when they really aren't. Don't forget, I can see the IP of who's creating and then responding on a thread. Your company has been caught doing that crap...

Yeah, except until you get through checking/cloning 9 128Gb microSD cards and then realize #10 is beyond recovery and you're just stuck since it's RAID 0.

Did you match the ROM firmware version between the drive you have and the LDR that you used?

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

Nice try SPAMMER SCUM!!! I knew it was some idiot like you who started this thread planning to come back and drop a link to your useless software.

Yes, thanks. Mounting it in MacOS and then using diskutil to restore it to the single HDD worked like a charm and booted right up.

Thanks, added it to the list.

I know this is SPAM but since we have a section on Cyber Security and it's a blog about Cyber Security I'll allow it.

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...

Do you have PC-3000?

Thanks! Somehow I didn't see this post before, but I just added it to the list.

Thanks! I had that added into my WD family search tool, but I guess I never added it to this list.

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...

If you have PC-3000 it's possible to put the PCB into boot ROM code mode and just digitally read/write the ROM in most cases. That way you never have to solder on your donor boards and can use them over and over again.

I'm still trying to add to this list (just added Arvika to it). If anyone else would like to be listed, just tell me your location and capabilities so I can add you.

Yeah, flux is important. I find that by wetting the contacts of the part you're removing it'll heat up faster than the surrounding components and be less likely to blow off other components. That and keeping your airflow speed low.

Oh! I see it, the capacitor is blown off and sitting to top left of where it should be. You can probably just re-heat and reattach it. Or just re-solder it with an iron.

Maybe my eyes just aren't very good but I'm having a hard time seeing what you're referring to. Are you saying there's a blown capacitor at location C19? Why not just try a different PCB and program the ROM to it this time instead of physically transferring it?

I suspect this might be a thread started with the intention to spam later, but what the heck...I'll bite Here's some programs I'd recommend: R-Studio (best for NTFS and great for many different file systems, RAID, etc.) R-Explorer (supports even more file systems like XFS and APFS, but not...

Hi Viyice, I've removed your link from you post due to your company's relentless spamming here. Normally I'd remove the post and/or company name as well, but for once you were at least honest about representing the software so I'll allow it. My feedback for your software: STOP SPAMMING THE...

Hi Thanh, To get access to the firmware resources you must be an active member of the forum. I don't give out the password when it's requested on the very first post. Try participating here for a bit, then ask again.

Do you have PC-3000 Larry? I forget.

Does the drive immediately get stuck busy when powered on, or does it come ready until you attempt reading ID? I might be able to work a trick that doesn't require any read channel shorting.

For some cases, yes. Before UFSExplorer had it's major updates to become R-Explorer I'd seen quite a few cases where it could get a good result on an HFS+ case when nothing else was getting more than a mess of lost folders and RAW files by type. Lately, I've been more inclined to use...

You're probably right, but I figured it's worth responding for the sake of anyone else reading this later.

I don't know. I've used 8 to 32 Gb thumb drives along with Linux Live builder many times to make bootable Knoppix thumb drives, and it's always worked fine. Perhaps give Parrot Linux a try: https://www.parrotsec.org/download-full.fx

I think that message in red is the problem: partition is too small Perhaps you used too small a thumbdrive for it to run?

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...

Despite what any of these review sites may say, these are really just sponsored reviews (as in they paid to be there). You see programs like Stellar in there and their software is complete crap. But, they've got a big marketing budget and pay to promote their software virtually everywhere. If...

No point responding here, this thread is just idiot spammers.

I disagree. It can only do simple firmware patches where no manual diagnostic or physical repair is necessary. It might suck up a handful of easy cases but won't put a serious dent in the amount of data recovery cases.

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...

Amarbir, how many cases per week are you doing over there to keep buying new tools at the rate you are?

Also, keep in mind that this video is showing a much older Seagate drive where this works. As you get to newer and newer drives the density is much higher. So it'll take less physical damage to make a platter unrecoverable. You're dealing with 1Tb platters in that model, so even scratches too...

In the patching of the ROM, did you answer "no" to the popup about "force drive setup state?"? I think you need to say "yes" if you are trying to get SA access, "no" is just for if you want un-encrypted data access, but you won't get full SA access either.

Yeah, I've got DDI 4. I don't use it terribly often having PC-3000 Express here, but there is the occasional case where it reads better than anything else. Definitely better than ddrescue. But, don't confuse it with a tool like PC-3000 which can do 100 times more things to actually fix...

I just did another head stuck one last week. Got the heads free and imaged 100% with original heads. Took more time to open the stupid cover than anything else.

Unfortunately, with cheaper tools you're going to find that there will be a huge percentage of cases you can't do. You could try starting out with something like MRT, but you'll very quickly realize just how much you can't do with it. Data recovery isn't a cheap business to get into. Unless...

Except it's not really accurate. DCM codes actually vary in length now with some being longer or shorter. You really just need to match the 2 or J and the character immediately preceding it if you're looking to match heads. So it'll always be letters such as VJ or T2 or TJ that you are...

Very nice indeed. This probably would have saved me $5000 worth of donors had I known this a few years ago.

Very interesting. I'll have to install it on Monday when my system is clear and see if they fixed some of the bugs with the latest update. I hope they added an option to disable the popup about running the task in the background. That's pretty annoying, especially when you work on a computer...

I think so, I wasn't sure if it was just me getting that message.

Because of this thread: http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=36241

Has anyone tested if Sabre 53 and Sabre 58 are cross-compatible for heads? I've got one here for recovery and I've got available donors from both families. But, the one that's the closest DCM and date match is actually from the opposite family.

: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...

R-Studio - Very good choice Recova - Only if you insist on a free option EaseUs - Mediocre (for the price R-Studio is 10x better) Kroll - Don't bother Stellar - Only thing "stellar" about is web spamming their brand. Total waste of money and whatever you read was definitely just paid spam of...

Cool! Thanks.

Not this week. This week I'm buying Ace's PC-3000 Flash system.

For some reason, this topic keeps showing as unread for me. I hope that post posting this response it goes away. Getting tired of looking at it.

I'm used to always copy/paste anyway. Even if it's 1000 characters wouldn't bother me as long as I can copy/paste. One time activation isn't an issue, that's to be expected. I misunderstood what you were saying.

My only concern is whether your activation server would be reliable enough. The moment that goes down for a bit, you'd have a lot of angry people wanting to scream at you. I know I've cursed Prosoft Engineering plenty of times when their activation servers were down and I couldn't launch Data...

I think MRT is a good imaging tool. I've been considering buying one for a while to just have some extra channels for that. However, I find their menus to be cluttered, disorganized, and overall just a mess compared to PC-3000.. Something that'll take me two seconds to do in PC-3000, like...

It would be nice if Ace added a feature like this. Maybe they are working on it and it's just taking a while to come out with a version that actually works. GPU accelerated cracking would be nice. Something like what Passware uses.

SPAM isn't strictly prohibited here, but crap posts like this are. If you represent a certain software brand and want to talk about your products here it's perfectly fine. But, pretending to be an end user will get you and your products banned from this forum fast.

I think most forensics pros will be using a SATA or USB write blocker anyway, so the OS attempting to write won't matter. Besides, there are builds of Linux such as Parrot Linux which are specifically built for forensics and don't attempt any writes to the disks just from connecting them. I...

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...

Post #8000 It's mine!

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:

When you clone a drive using ddrescue it's a block level copy, not file level. So anything you have on there will get nuked by the new image. As to what to do with your clone afterward, that largely depends on how good of a clone you get. If it's around 99.9% or better read, there's a good...

And they're back attempting to dump more crap here.

I don't seem to have anything that's quite a match for that. In a case like that, I'd probably just buy as close a donor as possible matching things like P/N, MLC, date, etc. and then hope that the PCB has the correct ROM and FW versions. Usually, that has worked for me. And, if you find that...

Honestly, I haven't done anything different than my usual method of carefully spinning the platter while gently guiding the heads back. Maybe, I've just been lucky so far. Most I've seen that were head stuck had the heads pretty close to the ramp, so it took very little movement to get them back.

I've had near perfect success with head stuck cases on these so far. Granted, it hasn't been a ton of them, but those seem to be going smoothly.

When will these morons learn that not only are their links not getting posted or fooling anyone but that it's just making them look bad? What's most idiotic about this is that SPAM isn't prohibited here when it's data recovery related and they just come out and acknowledge that they represent...

I've modified the name of your company's software in this post to better reflect your software. Enjoy!

These idiots just don't quit with this thread.

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...

That's because I marked that one as "featured" so it'll stand out. I'd prefer the lower prices stand out to people for psychological reasons. If the first price they see is $800, they might just bounce, but if they see some lower prices first they are more likely to actually make contact.

OK, prices have been updated: https://www.data-medics.com/cost-of-data-recovery/ Now to just get around to updating my online estimator tool :roll: This is going to take a while. It's a lot of work changing prices on a website that's been around for a bit. I keep finding references to...

So did you end up using the heads from the 2 platter model in the 1 platter version? Or did you get a different donor?

You don't need GRUB to boot a live build. GRUB is a bootloader for launching multiple OSs installed on the same disk. A live build installs nothing, it runs entirely off the USB thumb drive. Also, you can't use ddrescue effectively via VirtualBox or any other VM platform. It needs bare...

OK, so since no one was able to answer this question for me, I'll answer it myself. I upgraded my PC-3000 Express system from running an i5 with 4 cores to a Ryzen Threadripper which has a whopping 16 cores. Now I'm able to image drives over 120Mb/s(probably the drive's own limit) and only hit...

+1 to that. It saves a ton of time if you can just image the used sectors instead of fighting to image everything on a drive with a lot of bad sectors.

If you get a good clone without a ton of bad sectors and it was originally NTFS formatted (most likely since it was Windows) then it's likely that good data recovery software such as R-Studio or R-Explorer could rebuild much if not all of the folder structure and file names. As to it taking a...

Had you just come here first, we'd have told you to use ddrescue or HDDSuperClone to clone the drive while skipping around the bad sectors caused by the drop. Then, you could have used just about any data recovery software against the clone and it likely would have worked. I'm happy to hear...

I've removed the link you tried to spam in here, but I'll leave the rest of your post since it is somewhat informative.

Interesting. What does module C5 show?

Here, try the one from DragonFly 2 family:

I've got that version for Dragonfly 2 family. Are you sure it's DF3?

Thanks! I added those pairings to the list of cross-compatible families. Plese, let me know if you know of others that aren't listed so I can add them as well. I may not have time to read through all your case studies to figure them out.

Are they older Toshibas, and can you spin the platters at all? I may have a better solution for you.

And the spammer returns with another brand new one post account to try and redeem his product. As long as you losers continue to spam here we'll continue to spin your spam to accurately reflect your garbage products. Perhaps you should consider blacklisting our site from your spam list.

Updated that too. :D

I think most people don't want to say it, but probably this in most cases. I've never liked how any platter tools worked compared to some good 'ol aluminum foil tape. But, honestly it seems like I only ever need to platter swap about once or twice per year.

I highly doubt that heads from a 2 platter donor will work in a single platter one. I've never tried this with Rosewood family, but I'd highly suspect that the preamp chip is different since one is running more heads than the other in its overall design. If they were both two platter drives...

Thanks! Added it to the list.

For the Rosewoods, I actually use the tool from ApexToolLab. https://apextoollab.com/slim/ss2.html

I don't doubt the quality of their tools, for the price they must be well built. I just don't like supporting companies run by this type of person. I'd rather support someone who's a decent human being first and foremost, then work with them in providing feedback to help them improve their...

I always do free evaluation and then provide a written quote with the tier and final dollar amount spelled out, which they have to sign. I don't plan on changing that part of my business. Free evaluations gets people in the door.

How are you connecting the HDD to the computer currently? Directly by SATA or using a USB adapter? Some drives use a native 4K sector size, but most USB adapters assume a 512byte sector size. So it might be mutating the data.

Prayer may help :D Honestly, they often just don't work after head replacement. Sometimes not even after multiple heads replacement. The heads are weak and die easily, and the platters are soft and scratch easily. I think they're just going to be one of those series that have abysmally low...

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...

It's called a backup.

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...

Thanks for the tips. Toshiba and Samsung terminal commands have always seemed a bit elusive to really pin down how to use effectively. But, I suppose the low demand for data recovery, especially with Toshibas which hardly ever fail, leads to a lot less discussion compared to Seagate drives.

I've seen that thread but I guess I just never knew what that function was for.

It is unlikely that the PCB contacts are at fault, unless they looked very corroded. As to how to get TTL connecting, once you have the correct baud rate and everything set, the drive will just start sending logging as soon as it's powered on. As to buying a Seagate or WD, WD is the clear...

I must not be that well known, I've not heard of this terminal command, but then I've also never needed it since DE with utility translator seems to always do the trick.

Try posting your link again. It's just the first three posts that are restricted to cut down on link dump spam.

I'm certainly no JTAG expert, but perhaps someone else here with more experience in that regard could weigh in. I do see that it's an 8051 compatible microcontroller, so I'd assume you can read/write the ROM just using a simple programmer like this: http://www.sinowealth.com/ftp//8051%20m ...

Your problem isn't in any way related to the drives firmware/translator/etc. Your problem is purely logical in nature. Try using other data recovery software on the clone.

Yes, I plan to do that. I'll have pricing tables where each tier spells out the type of cases it typically includes. I'll also be updating my online estimator tool with a few additional questions to hopefully provide a near estimate of what tier a given case will fall under.

Obviously, the price scale will vary a lot from place to place. I was more looking for feedback about my planned tiering and relative scale of pricing for different project types.

Actually watching this video again, there are 16 heads, but the top two are floating in midair above the top platter and the bottom platter is completely unused. I guess Seagate is already having alignment issues and it's still just a concept model.

You're right, I guess that bottom platter was already deemed useless for storing data, so they just left it in there to avoid filling up their dumpster. :lol:

For the same reason that your doctor runs tests before performing surgery. Why risk the possibility of losing your data permanently (which will happen if you overheat the ROM chip) when a simple test could clearly tell you that it isn't the problem (which it almost certainly isn't in your...

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...

If there was a firmware or translation issue sectors generally wouldn't be reading at all past a certain point. This sounds more like a logical corruption issue to me. Have you tried scanning the entire clone disk (not the logical volume) using data recovery software such as R-Studio?

+1 +1 +1 to this. Don't assume your youtube buddies actually know what they are doing, or that they succeeded on the cases you see there. I see a ton of amateur mistakes on many of these guys videos.

I see from your post on the other forum that you got the heads freed up: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZHuMzYPuciYftODn2 Did you really think it'd help? That data is now a trillion particles floating through the air. Give it a rest.

Actually, if the drive is spinning and sounds normal, there's about an 80% chance that neither platter swap nor head swap will be required. Most drives with bad heads will click and eventually spin back down. The fact that yours isn't doing that indicates a high likelihood that it's actually a...

I'm not sure if this is a spam attempt, but at least it's on topic and doesn't seem to reference jihosoft.

Yes, generally reallocated sectors are added to the G-List when they are re-mapped and replaced with a spare sector.

Those aren't "sectors" or normal. Those rings are scratches right through the substrate of the platters. The actuator not moving is likely due to the fact that the heads are mangled and didn't land propely back onto the ramp. But, it doesn't much matter now. I'm afraid that drive is now...

That goes away once you reach enough posts. It's insulting by design to force you to be more active :lol: Happy to hear your case worked out.

Right, but only older versions of Windows (XP or earlier) still include hyperterminal. I don't know if the old program will even still run in Win 10.

No, it's hung up trying to mail into the country. My VNR went dud on me. It was recognized fine by Windows but the VNR software couldn't recognize it. I sent it back to have it repaired by them. Upon further investigation, it looks like it did clear customs sometime back and it just never...

Nice! I like that it can work with all the different voltages by internally switching. And even has a convenient 8 pin ROM slot built right in. :D Only ships from Poland though...that I'm not happy about. I've been on the phone for the last hour trying to find out why my VNR system has been...

You can do this via the r command. For example to read system file 93: S3 T>r93 Then you have to use Y-modem to download the file. I don't think any free hyperterminal programs actually include Y-Modem, but some paid ones do.

I use a MiniPro programmer model TL866A. But, you have to make sure you also get the 1.8V voltage step-down board to go with it for these NVRAM chips I believe. This listing here includes it, as you can see in the top left corner of the picture: https://www.ebay.com/itm/TL866A-USB-min ...

Have you tried following this guide: http://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopic.php?t=8555 ?

When will these idiots realize we're dumping their SPAM links and just making them look bad? Just FYI, this was a lame attempt by Jihosoft to SPAM their garbage software. Do not buy from any company whose product is so bad they have to lyingly promote it themselves on forums by pretending to...

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. Are you saying you can see data on the drive but can't copy the data? Or are you talking about backing up the drive's firmware? PC-3000 can unlock most SED locked drives.

Ah, so who knows what's actually going on then. For all we know that could be a Seagate ROM chip on there, or a blank one. Do you have an external programmer so you can try reading the chip and see what (if anything) it contains?

So far, I'm finding that the opening signature is pretty standard even across several versions. I am finding that the end has no clear signature though and the size can vary depending on the version of Bitcoin core as well as how many actual addresses you have in the wallet. So it may take...

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...

Yes, but his drive isn't clicking/spinning down. At least not from what he described, so I'm betting there's good chance the heads are still among the living.

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...

What "white dots" are you talking about? I see the glare of light hitting the topography of the slider, but no odd white dots. If the heads supposedly replaced by the other company and your donor heads both work in a donor drive, it's probably media damage to the SA. It could also be that the...

It's definitely a Seagate, not a Samsung. Given that's it's not clicking and spinning down, it's likely the firmware issue, not a heads issue. Usually, Seagate drives will always click and spin down if it's the heads. It'd probably be a case that'd be at our Tier 1 ($450) rate if you sent it...

A SATA - USB cable will only do exactly what you're already getting. It's a good thing chkdsk didn't work, that might have ruined all hope of recovery. That tool is NOT FOR DATA RECOVERY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Or for any situation where important data exists and isn't backed up. All it would have...

VMs on a SAN is a real mess. If there was more than one VM and especially if thin provisioning was done, it's likely that the VMDK files are fragmented badly. You'll probably need to actually read the native filesystem to have a chance to recover the VMDK files properly and it's probably some...

I like having a 2P end on the 2mm side. That's why I get the ones direct from China. These days, these e-packets from China arrive in about a week and a half for cheaper than shipping across the USA. I don't know how that's possible, but it does.

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?

Just a few things off the top of my head. 1. Are you sure the NVRAM (what you're calling BIOS) was soldered back on in the right direction and didn't accidentally get flipped upside down? 2. Are you sure you have the correct PCB version 3. Do you know if the drives have the same headmap? If...

Thanks! Added to the list and to the family search tool.

If you buy a set of these, they fit right in there: https://www.ebay.com/itm/40pcs-in-Row-4 ... Sw3xJVXuqh That way you don't have to cut anything, the 2.54mm end fits right on the terminal board, and the 2mm side fits inside PCB.

I forget which two pins it is, but they're in that black rectangle. I think it might be the two farthest from the USB port.

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%...

No, the CP's are mostly all in the ROM except for the G-List and SMART. I always read the ROM via terminal if possible first, then physically transplant. That way if I ever do cook one, I've got a backup and can program another chip. Happened once I think that I had to do that, and I was glad...

Do you flux your pads before applying hot air? I find that heats the solder much faster and prevents all that. I can't seem to remember the last time I cooked a ROM.

It's probably not going to be any use to try repairing the files, as it's likely that the correct data wasn't actually recovered. If VLC can't play an audio file, it's probably because the data recovery program was reading data at the wrong offset. So even though you have a file now with the...

I've seen cases where a head worked just well enough to read SA but not user area (which I assume is more dense). Usually, it'd still be able to read the occasional sector though. I highly doubt it's an SA issue, unless it's a refurbished drive or something like that.

No, why?

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...

According to Spildit 4 years ago on HDDGuru: https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25707 Perhaps you should check that the headstack isn't just stuck and unable to move for some reason.

I managed to round up a lot of them, and what I'm finding doesn't look promising for my case anyway. Seems ones that use the same encryption as this one typically look like this: Full to the end with data, as you can see. However, all copies of my client's key (both in SA and key sector)...

I had a feeling you were a worthless spammer from how off topic your post seemed. To anyone reading this, Soft2Secure is garbage software run by spamming morons. They can't make a legitimate sale because their software is so bad, so they resort to trying to trick stupid people into buying it...

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...

Thanks! I added it to the list as well as to my WD Family Search tool. And, welcome to the forum. :D

And more lonely. ;)

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...

You're right, I guess I never tried out that "gather free space" option after you open a logical volume on WinHex. I stand corrected. I probably should spend more time playing around with all the features of WinHex. I mostly just use it when I need to do a lot of searching in a RAW data stream.

Unless you have access to professional data recovery equipment, your best bet is probably to just clone the full drive. As Bankole said, PC-3000 Data Extractor software can definitely do that but it's quite an investment $$$ if you're not starting up a data recovery lab. I know some data...

The fact that they admit to being biased toward the Spec one and still speak highly of the Dylos makes me happy about my decision to use that as my primary monitor.

I think it's actually an update issue. I had it happen only after I tried to install the newer (gui) version over the top of the older version using the package installer. I was running Sparky Linux which is a Debian variant. Couldn't get it to work even after fully uninstalling, deleting the...

That same PCB number can work for either drive. But, it's very odd that module 02 would be showing a different model number. Are you sure the client wasn't trying some DIY recovery and really screwed something up?

Still, a long way to go to catch up to the competition. HDDGuru is heading toward 29K topics. But, having been around for many years is their advantage.

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

Yes, but he actually was able to find the answer he needed. That's half the magic of being successful in this business. :D

Nice work Bankole!

It was just an idea for a value addon in the Pro version.

I think I tired it once, and they didn't work, but I think that was a lost cause case too... If you put the patient PCB onto the donor drive, does it keep spinning? That's a good way to check.

I think he's talking to you PCLAB

Can anyone confirm if this pairing works?: 800069 - 800052

When the issue happened to me, was absolutely nothing. I'd put in hddsuperclone, and nothing would happen, no error message, nothing. I mostly use live builds anyway so it wasn't a big deal for me, and the issue hasn't come back since I moved over to a different Linux distro. It seemed to...

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 had the same thing happen when I went from an older version to a newer one. I never did manage to figure out why it wouldn't launch, so I just re-installed my OS.

One could use it along with a SATA write blocking bay. I've got a forensics operations server that I've picked up which could be used in tandem with your software to image drives, and I'd be certain that there was no modification since it's impossible at a hardware level. But, if you wanted to...

They are good drives, you'll probably be fine.

It's not able to read sector 0, which normally isn't a problem for ddrescue as it'll just skip ahead and continue trying to read. However, obviously, that's not working. I would guess that your drive's issue is worse off than just a few bad sectors. Perhaps it has a firmware issue preventing...

Keep in mind too that you should use good quality drives. I use all HGST SAS drives, so they can take the constant beating that we put them under each week. Cheap SATA drives probably won't fare as well and might become a nightmare of constantly changing disks.

With only 4 disks, it's better to stick with RAID 10 I suppose, unless you're planning to expand in the future. I chose Areca because they generally show the highest benchmarks for RAID 6 which I was planning to use from the start. A lost of RAID cards will see a significant slowdown going...

I personally use RAID 6 for this purpose. I opted for it because with 24 drives I lose a lot less to overhead than I would using RAID 10. But, you've got to have a good RAID controller or it'll be slower.

Alright, Payam PM'd me with their argument for why they think they can say they are the "best". I'm not saying I agree that they are, but I've agreed to add them to the list.

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.

If it's a WD drive you can search the family here: wd-family-search-t1778.html For Seagate, I'd probably just separate them by 7200.11, 7200.10, 7200.9, DM Series, etc.

Then I want to see proof!

Honestly, what we do is just separate them by brand (WD, Seagate, HGST, etc.) and put them into numbered bins which each hold around 10 drives. Then we keep an excel sheet with full specs of each drive listed and the bin number listed. So when I need a drive, I just look it up in my Excel...

I'm afraid I won't be adding your company. If you want to know why, see the picture below: Any company making such outlandish claims doesn't meet my criteria of being upfront and honest with people.

Pretty much any good data recoverry software will be able to work with a ddrescue image just as it would a regular drive. The real determining factor of what software will be best comes down to what the original file system was. R-Studio is good for many file systems, but in some cases a...

Sorry Larry. I'm not trying to bash those who don't have PC-3000, just want to keep it to labs that are truly specialized in just data recovery.

OK, I added you to the list.

Yeah, I think on the case I had I finally gave up and determined that it was just badly damaged SA (which you can't even try to fix up) since I couldn't get terminal access even after perfectly matched heads were installed. But, it was two years ago, so I'm not 100% sure I remember it.

I'll allow the link, but given that the drives don't have option to buy online or full specs listed, it's no use for the search engine. The search is so you can find a drive to buy right away.

Right, but need to know your capabilities in cases you do in-house. E.G. do you do flash, SSD, clean room, etc.

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...

Why are you quoting my own words (which I posted two years ago on HDD guru) back to me?

You have no prices posted, or option to buy on there. So what use is it?

Cool! Thanks for putting this question to bed finally. And, welcome to the forum! :D Be sure to introduce yourself in the introductions section.

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...

I just tried installing it all on an old Win 7 machine that's been off for the last six months, so no recent Windows updates have been done. Same thing, it sees the VNR, installs the drivers fine, but the VNR software says "no reader found". I'm thinking I may have a bad reader.

I've got nothing for that one, despite having about a hundred collected resources from Pinnacle family.

Yeah, the green LED is lit up just like normal.

No, it does make the noise when plugged in, appears in device manager, and allows me to install the driver just fine. So it doesn't seem like the device has a problem, it's more like the software just can't find it.

If you need instant data erasure/security that definitely can't be recovered, then encryption is your friend. If you run your sensitive data on an encrypted partition with a good strong password, then the second your computer is turned off the data is scrambled eggs to anyone who doesn't have...

Well, if it's a modern F3 series Seagate drive you could TTL into it and input the following commands. T>/1 1>G6A That'll clear the P-list which will make recovery darn near impossible by reasonable means. It'll also render the drive useless unless you've got some serious tools to repair it...

Yeah, even checked on an entirely different computer with a fresh install of everything and a different USB cable.

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...

Have you tried manually selecting the family and doing translator loading into RAM?

Just switch out the letter "U" for the letter "A" and match it as you normally feel comfortable on the other specs. I usually aim for the same REV up to the / and a somewhat close date. But, it just depends how much more it'll cost me to get a close match. If it's 3x the price, I'll take my...

Now you see why this is an awesome feature to add to the Pro version of your software. It's not something everyone will need, but for those into really advanced stuff, it's a nice feature to have.

That's exactly right.

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...

Yeah, I found it a bit confusing the first time I had to bring in SAS equipment. Given that I need to recover from all types of devices though, I pretty much just order every cable and adapter I can find assuming I'll need them at some point in the future.

I don't think that's actually a FC drive you ordered, just a sled designed to fit into a FC enclosure. I'm 90% sure that drive (once removed from the sled) is a normal SAS connector which you can use a cable like this to connect: https://www.amazon.com/CableDeconn-SFF- ... =sas+cable

Despite the fact that this might be considered SPAM, I'm allowing it because at least it's on topic and the developer represented themselves in an honest way.

You should that model doesn't read: WD10EZRX-00D8PB0 ? Anyway, here are the resources from the 3Tb version of that one: http://gofile.me/6nc9a/10I93mMqM

Looks exactly the same, not sure if I bought it from the same ebay merchant, but I'm pretty sure it's the same cheap Chinese device.

What model hard drive is it?

I don't think jol was angry, he's just trying hard to set the record straight. Guys like us are sick of people telling us that we need to just yank the platters out of the drives and throw them in a "universal platter reading machine", as if there was something like a CD-ROM drive which we...

What family drive is that?

Well, I received one of these today for testing and I'm not exactly impressed. It's nowhere near as sensitive as my Dylos DC1100 Pro is. For example: Open (not clean room) air of my office, Dylos is reading somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 0.5 micron particles and around 70-80 2.5...

I'm honestly not sure. It's worth trying to see if that works. I don't know if the DEK is stored in the NAS's own OS on the drives, or if it's stored in a ROM type chip inside the NAS hardware.

It's easy enough to see if they are a mirror, just compare a random sector on all the drives in HEX. I encountered one WD NAS where the data was all encrypted. Unfortunately, in my case the customer had reset the NAS so the key was lost. I'm honestly not even sure where the key is stored.

And what do you know, here's the idiot we were all waiting for!!! Returning to SPAM on his own question using a fresh new account. When will these morons move on to a different approach. Do they really think this is working and we're not dumping all these deceptive posts?

I'm pretty sure this thread is about to be spammed by some idiot, but I'll allow this first post just so I can find out which company I'm going to shame and ban from the forum. :D

What you're talking about is a fictitious machine that only exists in Hollywood movies. The FBI has no such capabilities. In fact, for a case like this, they'd be contracting it out to a commercial data recovery lab, who would have to tell them exactly what I just told you. The FBI or other...

Actually, it's the very opposite of what you think. They are all adaptive snowflakes. It's just that most other brands such as WD store a higher percentage of the adaptive information on the platters and read it from there on boot up. Toshiba was the only brand to store 90% of the system code...

To give a short answer to your questions. The chip can take a fair amount of heat as long as it's not for an extended period of time. The more likely cause of damage in most cases is actually physically damaging the chip from trying to lift it before the solder pads are all fully melted. If I...

Can you read sectors by the utility?

According to my list that's an Apollo family drive, but I can't personally verify that is accurate as I don't have any here.

Yeah, I'm at home now on my laptop and it's fine. Maybe it's the new switch I installed doing something stupid. Should be faster if anything, it's a 10Gbps switch. It's just odd that it only seemed to be affecting the forum and not other websites. Maybe the computer I was on just needed a...

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.

Amarbir said he confirmed the cross-compatibility of these two families. But, perhaps as Luke suggested it works one way and not the other way...

I suspect we're about to get spammed here.

Which way were you swapping? Fblite heads into Firebird or Firebird heads into FBlite?

Have you tried that with two working drives? Or on a case that may have media damage anyway?

I'm not sure if that SSD is even still here, and I'm tied up with a RAID recovery today. I'll have to investigate another time.

Try this one: hwinfo --block --short That should return a pretty concise list which includes all block storage devices. You just might have to add hwinfo as a dependency since not all distros include it.

hwinfo --short That's the command I most often use. I think there's a way to just list the data storage devices, but I can't remember what it is. That, or I just open up Gparted for a second and see the address.

So just open up something like putty and use that to force the PCB to a ready state, then unplug/plug back in the USB cable to the COM adapter so it's freed up to read ROM in MRT. Done!

Even if it does just one complete pass of overwrite, it will be unrecoverable. A zero fill is all you need. Just don't think that a format operation which takes only a few seconds will do that. Overwriting the data will take hours in most cases.

The one I just did showed up as /dev/nvme0n1 (I think that was the partition address). If I recall I tried to used HDDSuperClone GUI, but the device didn't even appear in the list of drives. Perhaps from command line I could have tried to force the issue, but I just used ddrescue instead...

It would also be nice if it could work with NVMe devices such as these Apple and M.2 SSDs. ddrescue does them just fine, as they rarely ever have bad sectors. But, a way to do it via GUI would be nice. Perhaps, just as a thought, when hddsuperclone can't read from a particular device, it...

That's because you don't have to. All you have to do is open up the terminal and press enter. It'll come ready in about 1.5 seconds. That's something I did go over in my original post.

We had discussed reading Toshiba ROM by terminal in this thread as well: how-to-read-rom-by-com-port-for-toshiba-usb-t1621.html I think writing it back is way too much work compared to just transferring the chip. However, reading it to have a backup is a good idea just in case anything were to...

Thanks! I updated the list again.

The only leve C> command I've ever used is C>Q which lists all the available commands.

I'd love to see that video you recorded, would be very interesting... if you're willing to share

So they do operations like translator regen by switching to level C> ? I have yet to get any of these in with firmware issues, so I haven't even tried Ace tech support.

Got you! I fixed it now.

I think Ace is having to go back to the drawing board for this family. A lot of the normal things, even in terminal, like translator regeneration will completely screw up a Rosewood family drive. For now, we are all guessing at what to do with them if there's any sort of firmware issues.

I'm allowing this post (although I know it's SPAM) because it is at least semi-relevant to the discussion. However, that program has nothing to do with phpBB and push notifications for new forum posts.

Thanks for the confirmation (or should I say de-confirmation) :D I left it in there marked as "doesn't work" just in case it's one of those odd things where it works in some cases but not others type of thing.

Given the low price, I might just buy one myself and compare them. Even if it's not accurate enough to be used for certification testing, it's still likely to be good for warning if you've got a problem in the hood.

https://www.data-medics.com/data-recovery-shop/ Link has been right in my signature all along :D

There shouldn't be any shift related to not using the G-list as the G-list only replaces individual sectors with spares. So it shouldn't shift all the data, just maybe read junk data in that one sector if it had been previously re-mapped.

I'm guessing it's media damage in the SA. It took about 6-7 minutes to clear SMART and about 10 minutes to do the regular translator regeneration that normally takes 30 seconds. Had to do it all manually through hand typed terminal commands. PC-3000 would time out way before the changes...

OK, finally got the translator sorted out. This drive now IDs and has sector access. It takes about 10 minutes of clicking before it comes ready, but it's at least possible to access data now. Now to see if it'll be possible to read the necessary data within this lifetime. Update: After...

Update, OK, I finally managed to get SA access via ATA (still nothing in terminal at all) by shorting the read channel and doing the LED:000000CC fix option. Seems I can read all modules fine, so I know heads are good. But, it's now showing 0 capacity and I can't regenerate translator. Now...

Currently, I'm working on trying to get terminal by shorting read channel, but so far no go.

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...

Yes and no. There's no automated way to do it, but if you can find where a large batch of jpgs are stored it can often be helpful to figure out the array. For example, by recovering a bunch of files, then adjusting stripe size and recovering them again, see if it looks better or worse. If...

If you don't have any knowledge of file system structures and how to analyze the layout, then yes, brute force is the general method. Just keep assembling it different ways and see what you find. If you have to scan each time though, it can get really time consuming.

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...

Wow, so how will that affect people who run a store both on their own website and push out listings on eBay I wonder. My site, for example, when I list a donor drive for sale, it's automatically pushed out to eBay as well. I make most my sales on eBay ultimately, but I do occasionally sell...

Just an update to this case. It is solved and closed out. Problem was a bad SSD side of the drive. Once I bypassed the SSD, got a full recovery. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Yeah, media damage was my first thought. Unfortunately, it's not always visible. Too bad there isn't a better way to safely check for damage than having to just replace heads over and over until the scratch becomes visible.

While on the subject of APFS, this is a hilarious video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=by_nIjcHmEo I guess the security isn't quite as tight as they'd like to think.

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...

It was actually just pointed out to me that R-Explorer appears to already have support for it. I'll have to do some testing to see if it really can do any reconstruction or if it's just supporting the filesystem when it's still working.

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...

Thanks! I added it to the sheet and to the family search tool.

I've found it near impossible to find anyone who does this. I've called a few places listed online who advertise clean room certifications, but none ever seem to return a phone call. Maybe coming out to just run a meter in a clean hood is somehow beneath them. That's why I just finally...

Just a few questions for you. First, are you trying to recover data, or just to refurbish the drive? Also, what tools do you have available? PC-3000, MRT?

The standard that included Class 100 is long obsolete. You should really be looking at the ISO 3 through ISO 5 standards now. Here's a PDF with the current rating standards: https://www.terrauniversal.com/file_lib ... 164241.pdf

Why do you think she's the office manager? I'm not nearly organized enough to run this company. I'm the talent here, she's the organizer. Doesn't matter that my title is CEO, I still need her permission to buy anything for the company.

Well, they say the mind is the second thing to go... Now if only I could remember what the first thing was... :?

Yeah, someone on HDDGuru already confirmed for me that the book contains nothing more than a collection of information already found on these forums.

The 520-byte sector drives don't seem to natively work in Linux. You can't format/partition them, or do much of that, as the OS doesn't really support the sector size. Linux does see them and assign a /dev designation to them though. You can also use tools like SG3_Utils to issue SCSI...

I may have tried a demo of it some years back, but probably should revisit it.

Yeah, I've got dozens of them here, but they don't last long at the rate we need em. Somehow the one I need is always one I don't have.

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...

Maybe it's a SED???

Yes, R-Studio for Linux like Blizzard said. Even just the demo can be used to find the settings. Then, you can assemble it however you'd like.

Wow! that logic analyzer they are using is almost $3,000 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Zeroplus-LAP-C- ... SwlXhZYmSd

Just FYI you can embed videos right into posts here using the bbvideo markup as follows: url to video The numbers are the size of the preview. That way it'll appear like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y920ltV584o

It can be done using any old SAS controller. I know because my consultant has been able to do it remotely several times using my linux machine and a simple AOC-SASLP-MV8 non-RAID controller. As to a 520-byte sector drive, I just sold off my last one on eBay last week. But, I do occasionally...

Usually, it's easiest to analyze and build a virtual RAID using software such as R-Studio or R-Explorer. But, with 5 drives you've got 120 possible drive order combinations. So it'll be quite tedious to try and brute force figure it out. Having some knowledge of filesystem structures will...

A case like yours is only possible with PC-3000 currently. The system costs around $6000 US to buy and takes about 5 years to learn how to use it.

If it's spinning continuously, then it might be a firmware issue. Unfortunately, that's a terminal locked model so you can't do anything to attempt recovery unless you've got a PC-3000 handy. Recovery is likely possible, but certainly not DIY without pro tools.

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...

That's just a default value reported by the PCB when the drive fails to initialize properly. How does the drive sound when it is first powered on? Does it click at all? Does it keep spinning or does it spin down after a few seconds? Given that it's a Grenada family drive, with that symptom...

1) I'm sure it would be a desired feature for anyone looking to venture into SAN recovery. I know there's been a few times I wished I could clone an EMC drive to just do some experimenting before hiring my normal consultant (who has his own custom software to do this). 2) You are correct, the...

Interesting.

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 assume from the link you dropped you're just here to spam. But, for anyone else reading this later, this is a data recovery forum. General computer questions such as installing an OS are better left to forums like Technibble, Tom's Hardware, etc.