We recently received a Western Digital hard drive that had been removed from a desktop machine by the client. They had taken it to a high street electronics store that offered a data recovery service, but they were unsuccessful. We were able to complete the data recovery successfully.
As soon as the drive arrived in our office, it was booked in and handed over to one of our data recovery technicians for a free diagnosis to see if the data recovery is feasible. This free data recovery diagnosis typically takes 24 hours, although for more challenging jobs it might take 48 hours. The technician working on the hard drive took it into our Class 100 clean room, where all data recovery work is undertaken. Hard drives are not designed to be opened, so physical data recovery work should always be undertaken in a data recovery clean room to ensure the environment is free of contaminants. But what does ‘Class 100’ mean? Put simply, it means our data recovery clean room will contain no more than 100 particles of dust per cubic foot, due to the air being constantly filtered. Our clean room environment allows our data recovery technicians to safely open hard drives without risking any further damage and compromising data.
When the hard drive was inspected, it became apparently very quickly that the hard drive had suffered from a head crash. This is one of the most common physical data recovery faults we see and requires a new set of read/write heads to be fitted. Our data recovery lab features a library of spare parts in excess of 16,000, and we were able to source a replacement set of read/write heads that were compatible with the client’s hard drive. Our data recovery team used specialist head stack replacement tools, enabling them to install the new heads without causing further damage to the drive’s platter. Once the new heads were fitted, we imaged the drive byte by byte to create a clone. Due to the damage sustained during the head crash, some sectors were unreadable – but we were still able to recover 90% of the client’s data. We provided a quote to the client for the final stage of the data recovery, which was accepted, and the data was copied onto a blank external hard drive.
Our experienced data recovery team is able to get your data back from hard drives that have suffered physical malfunctions like head crashes or motor failures. Get in touch with Data Recovery Specialists now for a free, no-obligation data recovery diagnosis, file listing of recoverable files and quote.
