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

It may have to do with the read buffer. While the drive is still reading from one head, it's already hitting read errors on the other head because it's now trying to buffer sectors from there. It's why on certain drives you need to disable heads entirely in RAM to image the other ones.

Yes, it would need to be read through DE. As far as I'm concerned PC-3000 w/o DE is just for refurbishing drives. DE makes it a complete package.

This feels spammy, but it's data recovery related so I'll allow it for now.

Here you go:

Microjogs were pretty close on both donors. But, honestly I've got to agree with Luke here. I rarely find that it matters. Didn't actually check them under a microscope. Strangely enough, the one that finally worked, was from a different country than the patient. It was the worst matched...

No, I saw that. But in the description he says this: So the drive is functional, just hasn't been tested to ensure all sectors are good. You'd be surprised how many times I've bought drives listed as "for parts" when it was the best donor I could find, and it turned out to be a fully...

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

And the winner: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Western-Digital ... xyOypSaV65 That's the one I'd buy as a donor.

Here's a couple that should work: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Western-Digital ... SwdzVXtHow or http://www.ebay.com/itm/OEM-HP-G6-1D38D ... SwY0lXRI67 The date is a little far off, but may still work.

Post a picture of the label so we can see the full specs, then perhaps we can help you find a donor. Just out of curiocity, what are you trying to get from the donor? PCB, heads?

Right, which can't be done unless you have developer mode enabled. That's where I'm thinking an "update package" might have an edge as it won't be dependent on the Android OS at all.

I don't think platter swap is even something you should consider. If you have access to PC-3000, I'd suggest you image the drive using a software translator with solving for G-list damage enabled. That will minimize the accessing of the SA so the drive hopefully will remain stable.

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

Yes, unfortunately seems a nuke and pave is the only offered solution I can find. Not exactly the way to go when it's the data you want back and not the phone. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

I think the new systems they are shipping include the 2.5" adapter, but anyone who's had PC-3000 for a length of time didn't get this adapter.

I wasn't aware that MRT supported Boot ROM code mode. I guess they must have added it since I last looked at it.

So they were actually able to recover it?

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

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

Yes, the server is down right now. One of the stupid Seagate drives in the NAS died and I can't afford recovery right now :lol: I just haven't gotten around to setting it back up on my other server. The real issue is that I never set up my SSL cert on the other server, so I've got to either...

The one I'm working on at the moment does try to boot, it just gets stuck on this stupid Droid Razr red eye boot graphic screen. What I'd love to see is an ultra light version of Linux which can boot from the micro SD as an update, that'll then either make it possible to mount the phones memory...

In my experience, when the platters have any major wobble it's usually a lost cause. I think platter swap is the way to go, but I'd quote high to be sure the risk is offset by the potential profit. The few like that I did eventually did get to read had so many bad sectors the data was pretty...

Yes, but some phones have odd issues that prevent this. Usually by the time they end up here some phone repair guy has already messed around with it and determined that it's bricked.

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

Hi Sam, welcome. I'm happy to hear you like the forum. We've all tried hard to keep it a positive place where people of all skill levels can discuss their cases. Too many guys forget what it's like to be a total noob at something and get a little hard on the new guys (I'll admit I've done it...

Doesn't look like encryption was enabled based on the look of that sector.

Thanks! Very nice contribution indeed. :D Been trying to learn some python myself for some little projects I'm working on.

I've actually had the same experience for cleaning platters. Just using these swabs and a bit of elbow grease: http://www.texwipe.com/store/p-838-tx761d.aspx

Those guys can be crooked too :lol: Don't believe me just ask some former choirboys. First off, do you have a way to actually decrypt the data if you find the key sector? E.G. Do you have PC-3000? If not it may not matter much. The magic sector is hidden in an HPA near the end of the drive...

If you ddrescue a 500Gb drive onto a 1Tb, you'll be left with 500Gb of old data at the end. It's best to either start with a zero filled blank drive or at least set the scan area to the lba size of the original drive you imaged. Did ddrescue seem to actually image the data, or did it just...

Scanning over USB can be painfully slow. USB 3.0 isn't bad, but you have to be sure your dock/adapter is a USB 3 one and not the more common USB 2. If you can SATA connect the drive where the image is stored it's even faster.

What!?!?!?! Maine isn't part of Canada? :o Always assumed it was since I never actually met anyone from there.

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

Yep, pretty much. :D

Yeah, I wasn't very optimistic about this one either with how mangled the heads were. Only told the customer to expect 30% chance of success. Then the donor I order they ship an entirely wrong drive, which was just close enough I figured it was worth a try (didn't work). Finally I discovered...

You guys must know that some day the US government is going to just say: "Hey Canada, we're out of wood.....Get Out!!!" Then you can be Americans too, and pay tens of thousands for basic crappy health care too :D .

I always select physical size, just so when it's skipping bad sectors at a small jump size it's not landing back in the same sector that just failed to read (8 logical to one physical). But, beyond that I don't think it really matters.

You know, to the best of my memory I can't remember ever needing to short the read channel on a 2.5" Seagate. I'm not saying it doesn't come up, but seems to be more of a desktop drive necessity.

I'm pretty sure Michael knows what he's doing, he's been around for a while. :D I know I hate those park on platter models too. Usually is best to just spin the platters and get the heads to the edge, then slip some plastic clips into there to lift and separate the heads.

It depends on the file system type really. But, for most cases I'd recommend using R-Studio to then scan the image: https://www.data-medics.com/product/r-studio-demo/

I see this information was pulled from this page: http://www.datarecoverygroup.com/articl ... ter-damage Can I assume you're Mike Hall?

Actually that picture I did have because I was the one who posted it. It's the ones from some other contributors that I didn't have the files to replace the corrupted ones. All better now.

I'll have to look into that. To be honest, I haven't done that many Samsung head swaps to notice you could read it from the ROM. Regardless, the case is already solved and data recovered. Thanks!

Yes, thanks for the update. I for one feel that the more we all share, the better off we'll all be. I can only imagine how many cases are floating around out there "unsolved" because the few people who know how to handle a particular situation are unwilling to share. Those could all be...

$100USD, which I'm pretty sure is around $1000 Canadian Pesos by now. :lol:

You know what, nevermind. I think I just found a good donor in a pile of old drives I had already here.

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

Are you trying to sell me Recovery Force?

That's actually something else I've considered.

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

Yes, I was just suggesting it be on youtube so could be embedded in the post, rather than using up 30Mb on the server and everyone having to download it. Now it can just be watched in the post. For future reference you can post YouTube videos into this forum using the format as shown below...

Seems this is a new trend of everyone sharing their resources. Sure is making things easier on that front. :D Keep it up!

That's the 10Tb version right? :lol:

Yeah, I've never seen anything quite like it before.

Amazingly enough, seems that only around 6 folders couldn't be placed after the job is complete. And despite having 60,000 bad sectors, they didn't hit one single user file. What's really amazing is that about 50,000 of the bad sectors were all in the pagefile.sys file. Yet that file was...

Yeah, I'm with Larry here. I expect it'll be more of a Dead Dog than an Iron Wolf.

Yeah, definitely looks like a head 0 issue. I think this is the same case here: http://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopi ... 154&t=8963

I was kind of thinking that would be the first thing I'd try too.

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

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

Just FYI to everyone, this server will likely be offline at times for the next week or two. There's a failing drive, and the NAS it's running on has zero redundancy (RAID 0). I'll have to swap it over to another NAS later, but I've been too busy to mess around with it lately.

That's new to me.

Just so you guys know, these .exe video's give a warning in Windows 10 that it's an untrusted application. I forced it to run anyway, and it's fine, but you should be aware of that. Perhaps as a suggestion you should just post the videos on Youtube and embed them here. If you give me...

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

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

I think I've done one, maybe two ZFS recoveries so far. Not very common, it's a FreeBSD file system.

Great feedback guys! Keep it coming and I'll keep adding/organizing these points into the original post. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Here's another one from today: Patient: WD Enterprise Velociraptor WD4500HLHX-01JJPV DCM: EBCV2B 19 Feb 2011 Malaysia Headmap: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 Donor: WD6000HLHX-01JJPV DCM: EBCV2B 18 Mar 2011 Malaysia Headmap: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Not much difference other than the capacity and extra head on the...

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

Try contacting the guy who posted the access portal. That would be.... ME!

I've heard mixed opinions on it, but never tried it myself. Wicked expensive from what I hear.

The NAS this runs on was down the other day, perhaps that's when they tried loggin in??? One of the drives started clicking (no joke! :lol: ). I pulled it out, put it back in and it started working again. Not sure how long before the drive will completely die, but given that it's all backed...

I've seen that, and it's probably a feature that'll eventually get me to cough up the money to buy the program.

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

I suspect this might be a SPAM post, as it's the user's first post. But, since it's relevant to the question asked, I'll allow it.

Been hoards of them around here. One online newspaper said it's currently hitting "epidemic levels" in Russia, Germany, and USA. Now they are even starting to target a lot more mobile devices. We are far from done with this mess. I'd guess that soon we'll start seeing some heavy duty...

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

Problem is most likely in media cache. Read system file 93 by terminal, disable everything, write back by terminal and you should be good. If the drive is getting stuck busy you may have to short the read channel to get terminal access each time. Often you have to do it twice. Once to read...

No, I don't do that. Too much to keep track of. Just buy it off me, then re-sell it on ebay when you're done. That's what I do with most of mine. It's a rare part number that Donor Drives sells for $175, so you should have no problem eventually selling it. Perhaps even at a profit. Here's...

Yep, just confirmed it's one of the odd ones where you can only read the ROM. I'm not sure what the point of reading a ROM is when you can't even write a different ROM back. Maybe Hitachi ROM really is "Read Only Memory". Anyway, I've got a functional drive with that same FW version: $125...

Here's the ROM code for that one: Try just writing it to another same number PCB. Or is that one where the utility only has the option to read ROM, but no option to write it?

What's the consolidated ROM version?

Currently I'm learning python. What a breath of fresh air after trying to learn Boreland C++ all those years ago. Seems any idiot can be a programmer now, it's gotten a lot easier.

Though this page does have what looks to be some real pictures of it: http://www.salvationdata.com/detail2/7-153-268.html Seems the display turned out a bit smaller than the original concept model.

They also claim this:

Not sure if it's one I'll be making publicly available, but likely yes (assuming one of these freelance programmers can make the app work). Trying to come up with a simplified way to determine settings in RAID 6 arrays that use RS. A simple program to determine which block is the RS out of the...

HAHA, thanks guys!

Not off the top of my head... Do you have three or four sample files?

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

Yes, I do believe you need to have full control on the folder to do it.

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

The local tech was able to ddrescue the drive with the client there to swipe his finger. So I'm actually working from the image file now remotely. Looks to be a simple corrupt FAT case.

No, no response from them. But, he also hasn't put anything there yet so they probably can't do anything yet. The second he uses the company name on the site, then it'll kick in.

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

I'm doubting the team is even still around. This is from an antique 20GB drive that was being used in a city funeral home. The city's own IT department didn't even know about this computer, which is why it wasn't being backed up. Fortunately after enough retries I managed to get a full read...

Bump! I finally after a second head swap got a good read on that database file. Only 14 bad sectors now, but I'm still looking for a good MDB repair tool as I know this won't be the last time it'll arise. Even if it's a few bucks, I'm more concerned that it works well. Recommendations?

Yeah, I don't know about anyone else, but I've been swamped with tough cases lately. Fortunately most are turning out successful, but only after several weeks and several sets of heads. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

I tried that and it can't help with encryption. However it does ID it as Troldesh. Oddly it took a few files before it recognized which one it was.

Unforutnately this was a VM, and a foolish tech accidentally cloned some data the wrong way wiping out the VMFS file table and beginning of the VMDK file. Only by analyzing the NTFS, was I able to build a partial file/folder structure. Besides the the drive I have wasn't even the infected...

OK, looks like you have to actually email these guys. That explains why I can't find any reference to a website.

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

Yeah, I've been busy doing SEO junk all day while waiting for some logical scans to finish. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Data Extractor has no issue detecting if the user pass is the correct one just by comparing it to the hash code included with the eDEK. I haven't figured that out exactly, but it's only a matter of spending the time. If necessary I've got a few computer programmer / mathematician / Rain Man...

I'm not too worried about this website. It'll never be found by anyone even if he does create it. There's two other companies out there name Data Medics and I've managed to push them out of all the top ten spots on Google for the term "Data Medics". Besides, I've already slapped GoDaddy.com...

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

I take issue with a few of these statements. I realize your aim is to push the necessity of metal tools, but some of your reasoning doesn't make real world sense. For example, you mention "thermal instability". I don't know about where you work, but here it's a steady 72F year round because I...

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

Yeah, I had the distinct feeling right when I spoke with him that he be the type to get a quote, then try to beat you up on price, then ask for a million extras at no extra cost.

The sad thing is this guy supposedly has 68 drives (mix of independent and RAID arrays) all needing recovery due to sabotage by a former business partner. I had a phone conversation with him about it. I haven't even done any business with him yet and I'm already starting to understand why his...

Nevemind. ScotchBroth deleted all his comments. Thanks Scotch!

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

I know a guy in the Dominican Republic who is working on exactly this. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Here you go:

For my first pass, I usually set a really low timeout like 300ms. Then I set it to just jump a few sectors 1, 4 or 8 typically (depending on the case) and disable the specified reading. If I don't trust the drive to survive, I might take and image by bitmap with the setting to interrupt...

Characters, digits. Potato, parsnip. What's the difference? Probably give up. Or do it CIA style and waterboard the password out of him.

Not according to every article I've read. Would take a billion years if you didn't have the eDEK and had to just gust guess the DEK. However guessing a user pass is much faster as they rarely are 64 digits in length. Most user passwords I've seen are around 10 characters. Also they made the...

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

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

What was the filesystem? HFS+ ?

I don't think there's any visible scratches. I've recovered over 99% of the sectors just fine. The issue was in the firmware, they just didn't know how to fix it so they chalked it up to media damage.

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

It might be a translator issue Check for NRG using T>v40 If there's no entries, just regenerate the translator using m0,6,2,,,,,22 Or do what's shown in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWjPARPwBdk

I don't, SSDs taking over may well mean the end our much or our business. Not to sound selfish, but I'd like to have HDDs coming in for at least another ten years.

I don't think they are going to lock down the entire blog going forward. That would be detrimental to their own SEO. I think it's just that they want to keep certain information they share a secret, as it might be possible to perform without a PC-3000. For example the unlock of the SED locked...

Have you tried disabling everything through in the Edit HDD ID menu?

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

Yes, I found two of those yesterday after I posted this. Hadn't really though to check for the 300GB size until I looked through collected resources for others in this same family. I also found a $30 one on ebay. It's from Thailand instead of Malaysia, but worth checking to see if it's the...

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

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

No User Password = Data Gone Forever This is the intention of encryption, and it works. That's your client's fault for not telling you if they did the secure reset. Or your fault for not asking them for more background info in the first place. It's why step number 1 is always to thoroughly...

Most definitely. PC-3000 should have shown that there was a user password, unless they did the secure reset option. In which case they are screwed.

Can you scroll down or get a pic of the complete sector? I'm thinking it's encrypted just based on the last two lines I can see.

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

Perhaps we should add a hdd sounds collection to the tutorials section. This forum allows soundcloud audio files to be embedded. Anyone have a good collection of HDD sounds they'd be willing to share with the forum?

Some drives will have more than one encryption key available and you have to verify which one correctly decrypts it. Also keep in mind there could be user encryption on the drive. Perhaps they were using a software encryption on top of the WD one.

Section added, and topic moved.

No, but someone already came out with a complete cure for the virus. It can now be undone:

Actually no. Those have been cooperating lately. One is a WD Red 4Tb and the other is a Samsung. A few others too, but those are the worst two. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Yes, perhaps someone with more forensics background could contribute. I know I'm no expert in that area. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

I love crazy cases, especially when they aren't here. :lol: I seem to get too many of those lately. Apparently someone got the impression I actually know what I'm doing and is sending me all the nightmares.

Yeah, it was a sinch the last time I did one.

Wait, your kid has a horse??? Wow, you really are an Aussie!

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

I'm not sure that MRT provides much in the way of remote support. You'll probably get more support on forums like this one. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Haha, the good 'ol foil tape method right? It's stiffer than the plastic stuff shown in the video, and stickier too. I actually had a machinist who makes surgical tools working on a new design for me, but he has yet to complete it. One of these days I'll have an offering in that department.

I don't like them. I find it doesn't hold the platters very well. Was a waste of money in my opinion, I think I only used them once.

I don't think it matters. All drives of the same family & firmware use the same loader I think. Though I can't say I honestly have even used SG loaders much. I think I only had one or two cases where it was actually necessary and actually helped.

I think hipo was referring to preventing future infection of viruses like this. Decrypting the data after infection is a whole other can of worms.

Updated!

Thanks! Added it.

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

To answer your questions: 1. No 2. There's a couple guys who supposedly know how to rebuild lost F3 ROM, but they aren't willing to share it with anyone and want a small fortune to do it.

So what happens when one device fails, goes bad, or is unavailable? Does the system have built in file redundancy to guarantee availability?

Yes, welcome! I think you're the first person from Japan to join this forum, and quite the expert from what I've heard. Nice to see you here. :D

Yeah, I realize that and that's why I have it give the price first, then ask about contacting them. I know I browse away immediately when I see them ask for contact details. But, this way at least they can get the price first and decide after if they want to be contacted.

Yep, he who trademarks first owns the rights. Like I said, did it only to protect myself. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Just had my first actual customer submission on the form this afternoon. Only 24 hours after launching it. So I guess it actually does work :D .

Exactly. Short of actually using the name Data Medics and copying my content like that one website, I don't expect to do much enforcing. Just protecting my own rights to use the name without any issue.

Though I suppose that if I'm going to open that can of worms, I have to also sue this company: http://www.sandiegorecovery.com/index.php And this one: http://www.macmedics.com/recovery.htm And definitely this one: http://www.datamedics.com/local/summit/ ... overy.html This one too...

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

I realize that, and I'm certain that the tool isn't for everyone. I think it may be more useful for computer shops who have clients on hand and would like to be able to provide a price estimate to them when deciding whether or not to send it out to us. Or for those who are a little more tech...

Yes, the monolith / non-monolith is a bit of a catch point I found too. Unfortunately Google forms doesn't let me add images, but perhaps I will add a link to an article with some images with contrasting pictures. I had considered leaving it out, but it has such a profound affect on the...

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

Yes, I did confirm it's possible to move module 01 location. The reference to it's location has to be edited in ROM (best if done after you actually write the module there). I've posted a write up of how to do it in the data recovery secrets section.

There's a full write up of how the m0 command works on this thread: seagate-f3-terminal-command-set-t901.html Just be sure to download the txt file with the long explanation.

Not always. I often will do the logical on the same station. Just copying a file out with R-Studio has a really minimal chance of getting any kind of infection. It's really just copying LBAs to new locations and creating an entry in the destination MFT. I've never once run an executable file...

You know what, nevermind I seem to have stabilized it. Seems it was a combination of issues with the SA on head 1 and a problem with head 5. Disabled H5 and now it's stable enough to image the other heads. Looks like this one will be a double head swap case. Though I'd still like to know if...

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

Yeah, I've never been one to run AV on my PC-3000 system, it causes way too many interruptions. Even just M$ defender has been giving me issues as of late and I had to disable it. Just gotta be careful what you install on the system that's all. AV will scan every file passing though being...

Yeah, that's what I though. I've used their $100 voucher in the past, and so now they won't let me use any more of them. I never really found adwords to be cost effective anyway. Long term, organic results are where it's at.

I've been running my PC-3000 Express Card in Win 10 for a while now with no issues. It's a safe upgrade.

Is it limited to new adwords users only? I know their vouchers usually are.

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

Seems from that presentation that they subscribe to the burnish / glide machine too. Still not sure I'm convinced it's the best method. Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Sorry, our next vacation is already booked. Bangkok, here we come!

Congrats on a case well solved using minimal tools. With some real tools you'd be a formidable force for good.

I'm up for the idea of adding forensics and info security sections. Probably could move a lot of crypto virus discussions into that section. I'm not sure that many current users of this forum are in the forensics side of the business, but as they say "if you build it, they will come"...

Awesome to hear that the case worked out! Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Moving modules isn't usually a problem. But, this time it's the actual modules directory that's the issue. A bit more challenging.

After a bit more investigating, it looks like the Module 01 location is actually spelled out in ROM. Trying to adjust it now, will update. Might have to move this to the secrets section if I pull it off.

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

Welcome Miguel! I recognize your nickname from HDDGuru, nice to see you come over here too. Sent from my SM-P600 using Tapatalk

It's not a bad idea, but probably not much demand. Guys with hardware imagers generally prefer to use those over ddrescue and only run it if it's a type of media they can't run on the hardware imager like a SCSI or SAS drive.

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

It can't hurt to have the info listed. Even if it's just for quick reference. I've recently done it the same way Jol mentioned and worked out beautifully. But, if you want I'll create a sticky in this section to post cross compatible Toshiba USB & SATA PCB's.

I think you can basically accomplish that by leaving the power connected for a few minutes, then just pull the SATA and put it back in. Maybe it's just a slow responder.

Perhaps it's just a simple translator regeneration that it needs.... worth a try. Though personally I'd prefer to get it on a PC-3000 and run some better tests first.

I have a tutorial here: https://www.data-medics.com/data-recove ... s-5-steps/ The issue is likely Windows defender blocking the download. And the fact that he included the word "petya" in the name of the contained exe makes even the browser go crazy. See if following my guide works.

Here's the Diablo3D family LDR's:

Yeah, in my experience ddrescue doesn't even work well over USB. That's why in my tutorial I mention the need to directly SATA connect.

If you can read the system file using the r command, one of us can tweak it for you so you just write it back.

No longer needed. Looks like a solution for Petya has already posted. I added a quick how to removal guide here: https://www.data-medics.com/data-recove ... s-5-steps/

Actually you need to get three or four sample files to analyze. I can write the R-Studio xml file for you, I just need to see some samples to figure out it's unique signature.

Did you try disabling everything in system file 93 and writing it back to the drive? That might go a long way toward stabilizing it so you can work with it. Also, what tools do you have available to work with, PC-3000?

I don't mind you having a link signature. Go ahead and add it back in. I figure the back link to your homepage is a fair trade for creating content on this forum which ultimately is good for my site (forum & homepage). I don't mind the links, I enabled them on purpose to encourage more users...

Looks like this question was already answered on ACE forum: http://forum.acelaboratory.com/viewtopi ... 745#p30745

No, you'll just get more links in total. Why do you care about link building to your Facebook page anyway?

I used to live in Anchorage and Valdez when I was a kid. Been a few years but I'm no stranger to AK.

Which one of those states are you in? Perhaps I can sanitize and get you a few crapped out drives that people leave here for recycling after recovery is done.

I would think those would be compatible, how far off is the date? Also are you using the patient PCB, or did you switch them by mistake?

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

Done!

If you can read by composite, or have compatible resources from a donor you can try re-writing the modules by ABA and see if they'll take. If that doesn't work, you can edit module 1 to move the modules location and see if you can write by ABA there and have it take. Then, if all that fails...

No, I think it is mostly all just BS factor. In fact, between you and me, I've actually heard that from some bonifide clean room owners. Only possible benefit I can see to a walk in clean room is that it's slightly more convenient than working with your hands in the box all the time. Now not...

I think we all just use the benchtop clean room hood. There's no point in a walk in clean room for data recovery other than to dupe government bureaucrats into thinking they're more "high tech" than they really are, then setting standards that make no sense so there's no competition for their...

The caption clearly describes them as working with open spinning drives trying to fix them.

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

Edit: If you just want a Facebook link back, add your facebook account to your profile. It creates a link under your avatar.

I decided on only allowing a single link per signature so as to not saturate the forum with too many outbound links. I want the forum's SEO to be good too, not just yours. As it is I had to add a bunch of internal site links in my own signature just so the ratio of internal/external links...

No special computer system. Just some software tools with the right combination of techniques. Can be done on any system. It wouldn't be very profitable for me to do it myself. But, could be a great way to keep a lower level tech busy during slower times. That way maybe I can actually...

I generally do everything via PayPal anyway, so as long as you're in a country where PayPal does business I can just send an invoice at the end.

5 to 10 minutes depending on how badly damaged.

No, I think I finally just ended up changing heads on it. Hard to remember now, been so many other cases since then. Was almost a year ago now.

I doubt it if he hasn't managed to unlock the SED yet.

maybe because you forgot to change the hxxp to http. It's funny that phpBB makes hxxp into a url when it obviously isn't a valid one.

Right, the tool wasn't what I needed back last year when this case was going on. My issue was that the drive was reading slower than a dial up modem, and couldn't find the key when I tried to unlock. I was hoping to find more of a sector range that it resides in, or location relative to the...

And you're following this guide exactly?: http://blog.acelaboratory.com/pc-3000-h ... rives.html It's always worked for me. I know sometimes drives will spit out an error code after ldr upload, but then they still work afterward so it actually did take. Perhaps this is a similar situation.

I've sent a cease and desist notice to both them and their hosting company. So I don't imagine the site will be up for long. I've also demanded they surrender the domain name to me. Wouldn't mind having raiddatarecovery.org point to my site. Let's see if they'll meet my demands or decide to...

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

Welcome to the forum. Nice to see another country represented here.

I've seen a lot of IDE drives that take up to two minutes to ID, but after that they work just fine. I guess they are just from a time when computers booted up much more slowly giving you time to get a cup of coffee and possibly drink it before going to work. :D

If you ever have the need arise to handle such a case, just PM me. As the OP of the "secret" I can share it with you. I just can't share anyone else's secret posts. That's the concept of the section, a place where you can post and it'll only be seen on a limited basis by those you trust not...

Sorry, just that I like to keep a section with some good tidbits as a reward for only the most active contributors. It's my way of encouraging more people to post good stuff that'll get them nominated to have access by the other members. Even I don't really decide who has access, everyone...

I would guess that after upgrading his PC-3000 to the new version he found he didn't need it as much. I picked up a good used unit for just that same reason. It used to be that DDI 4 was 70% faster at imaging, but now PC-3000 is actually much faster in some cases. To be honest, I barely use...

Wow! as much as I've teased Brian, even I have to say that was below the belt. :lol:

Hahahahaha :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: I've been saying this for a long time. Every time I try quoting a project high hoping they back out they insist on proceeding. Just the other day, I was telling my wife that we need to start quoting double the price and then try to talk...

I'll post it in the secrets section. :D Edit: Posted it here: remove-sliders-stuck-in-between-platters-t1286.html

Sliders both removed and data is now imaging at 35Mb/s from the drive :D . I never expected that. I did three head swaps today, and this was the one I was pretty sure would fail. Now it's the only one that's actually working and the Toshiba & Hitachi drives I expected to work, both didn't.

Yep, that's what it does: https://www.grahamcluley.com/2016/03/petya-ransomware/ MBR and MFT. Though with NTFS, you may actually get a good chunk of data back by scanning with R-Studio. Sounds like it doesn't actually touch the rest of the data. Anyone have a copy of this virus I can play with?

Judging by how fast that virus works, it can't be encrypting the entire volume.... I'm guessing it's just the MBR & $MFT that it's encrypting. I'd bet you could still get most everything recovered in RAW, just without much for file names.

I like the idea of encrypting the MBR, could lead to a lot of work for us if they just stopped there. Too bad they had to go and encrypt the rest of the drive :lol: .

It requires a few techniques and a fair amount of manual tweaking each time. I don't think an automatic anything is likely to ever happen. At least I know I don't have the programming skills to do it. It requires being able to see what's happening to the image as you're doing it, and I don't...

Now if anyone else would like a further demonstration, please post a damaged file for me to fix. One free demo for anyone! If all you have are customer files, you can PM me one, I'll fix it and PM back to you so it isn't publically posted.

Now here's a demonstration using deleted 4K sector size. Obviously it causes more damage with the larger sector size. In this case I deleted only two sectors. Damaged File: Damaged Blocks Removed and Color Fixed: Missing Areas Filled In: And the Original Undamaged File for Comparison:

OK, I've made a quick sample to show what I can do in this JPEG repair process. This is using a picture I actually took and damaged on purpose for this comparison. First I deleted about a dozen sectors at 3 locations in the jpg, resulting in this: Then I removed the damaged jpeg stream...

I don't think we pay any sales tax on Amazon here in RI regardless. I'm pretty sure that only applies to states where they have a physical warehouse. Since RI is such a small state, it all comes from Massachusetts to here.

I have plenty of pictures here I could use for testing purposes, been doing that already. The reason I'm asking for pictures from someone else like this is that it proves my technique actually repaired the damaged file, and I didn't already have the original to use. Even if it's just a picture...

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

Hey Brian, Nice to see you here. You can subscribe to entire forums using the TapaTalk mobile app version of this forum. It'll even push out email notifications if you want it to. I'll see if adding that feature to the main board is an option, but you're honestly the first person to express...

You're most likely right. I'm just trying to get more confirmation on which ones are definitely which ones.

I just added another pair that I'm pretty sure will work, but I haven't had opportunity to test it yet: 2060-800041-000 - USB 2060-800022-000 - SATA

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

I justified selling my SD tools by convincing myself that I'm at least preventing someone from paying full price to get them :lol: . Hopefully that poor guy in Malaysia who bought them on ebay can resell them and get his money back.

I have to agree with Bankole here. Spending money collecting a lot of sub-par & out of date tools may not be your best investment. If you really can't afford to buy a legitimate PC-3000 which will have the potential for getting updates, perhaps you might consider MRT tools. Certainly isn't as...

For a while I had some plastic trays I had picked up at the container store. They looked sort of like this: http://www.containerstore.com/s/collect ... 714C525F59 But, quickly couldn't keep up with the number of heads out of their original drives. So now, I just put the original bad heads in...

Nice! Thanks for sharing. :D Are the top ones the patient and the bottom ones the donor? Only reason I ask is I've heard some guys mention preferring the heads from Thailand over the others.

That's all for the model number. I'm taking about the actual part number, something I don't think anyone has fully understood yet.

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

Here's one I just did today that worked: Patient: WD10JMVW-11AJGS2 - My Passport USB DCM: HHKTJHN Date: 01 Jul 2015 Country: Malaysia Donor: WD10JPVX-22JC3T0 - SATA Laptop Drive DMC: HHKTJBK Date: 25 Jul 2015 Country: Malaysia ID'd right away and is imaging from all heads (just one slow one).

I wonder if swabs like this would work well: https://texwipe.com/files/pdfs/msds_tds ... TDS_en.pdf Or if they would be too abrasive and cause damage.

Might you or anyone else here be interested in going in on a supply of these? I can get a box of 1000 for around $1000 US. I don't think I'll need that many so perhaps we can split it up.... just a thought.

What! your SMD rework station doesn't have a HEPA filter on it??? Just kidding. I'm not sure I'm keen on the idea of heating platters, have your even found that to help with removing sliders? I've usually only had to deal with the top ones being stuck, so physical force did the trick...

Yeah, given that it's a Seagate my money is on it not working if I remove the top platter. Maybe I should just install a set of junk heads that are already ruined but not physically damaged (and fit in the drive).... let it whack them out when it starts clicking.. :lol:

SPAM isn't entirely banned here, but deceptive link dropping is. If they want to come on here clearly representing themselves and talk about their software they are more than welcome to. What isn't allowed is posting fake questions, then using another account responding with "try this program...

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

Update: Now that I've got all the data and don't mind messing around more I tried a few more things. Seems the ALIST wasn't the issue at all, it was the password module. Even though I'm pretty sure there was never a pass set, I wiped out and did a total password reset, and now it has UDMA...

I don't think so, I played around with it before and it made no difference. Says a user pass is set, but when I had it read the password there wasn't one. Maybe just an unrelated glitch I think.

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

Need actual model numbers, you know like ST800...... & HTS........ so we know what specific issues you're likely facing. We aren't magicians here, we can't just divine what your problem is. Also, are the drives making any noise such as clicking? Are they actually spinning? Do they appear in...

You'll need to at least provide model numbers, and more info like that before we can even begin to point you in the right direction if you're looking to DIY this case. Professional recovery is always your best option if you can afford it, as DIY often does lead to permanent data loss.

Problem resolved. Seems that Verizon had forgotten to apply our last payment to the account and this is their way of "blocking" your service. Maybe I should send them a bill for 4 hours of my time wasted trying to figure out this issue.

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

You're talking about IV fluid, I'm not. I'm talking about just water for injection like this: http://www.mountainside-medical.com/pro ... 5649592388 Nothing but distilled water that's been UV serilized. Here's the "drug facts" which clearly show the ingredients...

The LDR is the same.

Water for injection is just really pure distilled sterile water. It's used to dilute certain medications where saline wouldn't work. It's just really pure water, so pure it won't leave any residue behind when it dries.

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

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

Using one with 4 heads is better anyway. That one lone head is hard to position when putting the heads back into the drive. With an even number, you can keep a separator in there.

Footnote added. Thanks for the suggestion.

Here you go: The consolidated ROM version is 0004002Q, which you mentioned above. I just didn't get a chance to look for it until now. But for future reference, you can use any module 11 from a same family drive with that ROM version. For example I have resources from a WD20EFRX-00DC0B0...

Just for LDR, model doesn't even matter. Just the consolidated ROM version. Other modules though it might matter.

Thanks, list updated.

Any chance your software can (or ever will) support recovery from RAID arrays with proprietary file systems such as EMC uses?

Update: Guess we'll never know. After leaving it powered on overnight imaging the three good heads, head 1 is now reading data at full speed. Maybe just needed to warm up for a while. Perhaps it was still frozen from the last guy who had it :lol: .

Need to know what consolidated ROM version it is.

Still waiting on quote approval from customer. Not killing any donors until I at least have that in the bag.

The way they are date stamped and the size makes me think it might be a database backup file. Only problem is that it isn't where I actually store or backup my database files. Then again, my !Profiles folder seems to have suddenly started using my C: again instead of my D: where I had it all...

Depends on the case. Some models, if you head swap it might never come ready again. So if it's reading steady however slow, best to leave it alone and let it do it's thing.

I do have the express card, but I've never seen this myself either. Last week my SSD was only about 1/3 full, then suddenly today it's jam packed. Anyway, I've deleted the files and all seems to be working fine still. Perhaps it was some sort of temp file that should have been deleted and...

OK, so here's an odd one I'm thinking of attempting. Patient: WD6400AAKS-65A7B2 DCM: HGRNNV2MAB Date: 08 Jan 2010 Donor: WD5000AAKS-75A7B2 DCM: HHRNHV2MGB Date: 05 Jul 2009 I know it's a smaller capacity donor, but same headmap, same preamp rev & vendor, the micro jogs for the head I...

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

I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just waiting until it can power cycle drives that hang before I'm likely to implement the tool in day to day use here.

Hey, still isn't too bad. I've had jobs image for two full months before we had enough data to finally disconnect it. I've heard of other guys here who went six+ months. This is where a software tool would be awesome as it'll only tie up a cheap Linux computer instead of a $5000 hardware...

I've seen it plenty of times. Not usually with Hitachi but I certainly have seen it on plenty of WD's.

Sometimes a head can read SA but not sectors because it's either weak or maybe just not calibrated well to the drive. The SA is less dense than the actual user area, so it's easier for the head to read.

Awesome work. I'll have to set up a test rig using some cases I've already finished and make some comparisons. Maybe even a YouTube video or two.

Yes, I went through and compared a bunch of them within the same family but different' models/capacity and module 11 is all the same just as long as it's the same family and consolidated ROM version. I didn't check every family, but enough that I'm satisfied it doesn't matter in most cases...

That's new to me.... almost seems like the ROM chip has gone bad and isn't being recognized by the MC. Have you tried moving the U12 to another board and see if you can read it there?

Here you go.

It was three 500GB drives in RAID 5. My guess is that the controller just always uses 64KB block size and that "automatic" business is just a lot of bunk, but I don't have a way to test it.

Finally beat this RAID. Right A-Sync parity rotation and 64Kb block size was the magic trick. Absolute last configuration I was going to try was the correct one. Doh! :roll: Moving on to an EMC RAID for tomorrow now. :o

Like I said, I'm helping someone remotely so not a case where I'm going to invest in buying a crappy old RAID controller or one where I have access to it. Would have been really easy too, if I just had a partition table to work with.

Yes, I did come across that in my research. But, still never mentions any actual stripe "sizes", just the fact that the user can't configure it. I've already ruled out the possibility of it being smaller than 64K, but not sure if it might be bigger than that yet.

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

For Toshiba that's not that far off. I've done over 8 months off and it worked fine.

So I assume the SATA PCB worked then?

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

Here's Denali Family LDRs:

Here's Cypress Family:

Here's Cougar Family:

Yeah, I don't think the capacity is likely to make any difference as jol said. Unless there's more platters in which case it might use a different MC, but yours doesn't so should be good.

Could be, or could possibly just be a non-compatible ROM as that too can make the drive not spin up. Just out of curiosity, how did you match the PCB's? Just based on main IC and MC, or did you actually match the model numbers by replacing the U with an A?

Doing professional data recovery work you quickly learn the importance of a UPS. I've now got a UPS for just about everything in my office.

+1 Change heads.

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

Click Here To Find Out: Yes, only cleaning up the last few hundred sectors now I didn't even know about this feature of the forum....cool!

Are you using a software translator or just standard UDMA? Doesn't sound like G-List damage if it's only affecting one head, but you never know.

In this case it was the T2 I was concerned about: "HANNNT2CH" "HBRNHT2CGN" That's the really critical part. Normally though I'd try to match the NNT2 part, but it's not as critical.

The extra 96MB at the end is helpful. If you image with ddrescue and complete the image of one drive, then just image the other until the 4TB drive is full. Hopefully it won't be more than 96MB which isn't imaged.

Was an expedited project and the donor was one I had in house already. Normally I might not have tried it, but because of the urgency, it was worth the risk of ruining a drive. Besides, in my estimation the correct factors did add up: Family, Headmap, Date, critical two digits of DCM. So I...

It will not fit both using ddrescue because the filesystem of the 4TB takes up some space so you're left with just under 4TB of actual space. However for the purpose of recovering the RAID the last few MB of one disk may not make any difference. Probably isn't any data there anyway.

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

If you create the images using R-Studio (even just the demo) they'll be a compressed format that I can still work with to rebuild the RAID. Only issue is it doesn't handle bad sectors well, and there's always the strong possibility of hitting some. Especially given that they're Seagate drives.

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

Sorry for the slow response, no one here looks at the forum too much over the weekends. I honestly don't think "restoring" the partition table is even the right direction to be looking in. Most likely the partition is in the wrong place because the RAID array settings are wrong and it's...

That MBR in picture 3 looks like a decrypted MBR. Are you sure it's even encrypted? Also, could be software encrypted. I just was dealing with one where bitlocker was actually the culprit.

Is the key in the SA the same as the magic sector near the end? I've seen cases where they were different and you just have to find the one that works.

Sorry, I guess I don't really ever think in terms of "saving" the drive. Once I've got the data copied, it's pretty much scrap in my mind. Unless I need parts from it for another recovery project :D .

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

I don't replace them, I just backup ROM first thing then image the data. Or program another PCB if I don't trust it. As long as you've got a good power supply and run on a UPS you should have no issue running a drive without it long enough to extract the data.

Usually just my Tier 1 $450 price.

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

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

Really, I just did one this week and imaged 99.9% without changing the heads.

Would I be correct to assume you mean Smart Hot Swap it by SHS??? and if so how? I've never seen this process posted anywhere for Seagate drives, but I've always assumed there was a way. If so please do post some info in the secrets section.

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

OK, just helped him out remotely. Turned out to be a simple clear G-List, then setup software translator to solve G-List corruption case. Imaging 99% of sectors now at around 20Mb/s. Read/write heads are a bit unstable, but with 5 retries it's cleaning up most sectors. With a bit more...

No I really do SPAM his forum :D . Need those back links to be sure my forum beats his in the search results.

Yes, was a real pain in the neck. But I'm already seeing a nice speed boost on my WordPress side of the site, so it'll be worth it I n the long run. I'm curious to see how it'll affect my bounce rate.

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

Your link to "recoveyforce.com" isn't working. Maybe should have put an r in there.

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

Usually. You can try doing a RAW scan to see what can be salvaged, but it's usually minimal.

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

Brilliant! Just Brilliant! I think this sounds like a plan which could really work.

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

Yes the Capitol e's is just part of the font. I chose it because it matched the font I've been using in my brand name lately.

Yeah, I was heading for a more clean less cluttered design this time. So the stethoscope didn't fit in.

Yep, it wasn't re-uploading because the forum assumed it was a duplicate upload of the same file. How about now, look a little better?:

I think because they all had the same exact file name and were posted in the same thread, each new upload overwrote the previous one. Or maybe it never even uploaded.

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

Buccaneer Family:

Here's Bobcat Family:

Here's Big Bear Family:

Here's Aztec PL Family:

Update again, different font this time:

Hmm.... maybe I could darken that side of the background image to make the white stand out more. Update: OK, I darkened it a bit on the left side. Look a little clearer now?

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

OK, I posted it in the Data Recovery Secrets section. Not something I want to post publicly, which you'll understand when you read it :D .