We recently completed a successful data recovery job on a Compaq hard drive that had stopped working with age – here’s how our team got on.

The drive in question was a Compaq 9.1 GB SCSI disk. Nothing out of the ordinary was reported by the client – the hard drive just stopped spinning after a slight scratching noise emanating from the chassis. As soon as the hard drive arrived into the office, it was catalogued with its unique job reference number, that followed it throughout the process. It was then passed onto our hard drive data recovery team for a free diagnosis and no-obligation quote. The hard drive was disassembled in our Class 100 Clean Room, ensuring there are no more than 100 particles of dust per cubic foot; in reality, there will be much less. Working in a clean room environment allows our hard drive data recovery team to replicate the conditions in which the hard drive was originally assembled in, and ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible. The one thing the client did point out is that the drive had been in operation for nearly a decade, and had been processing requests very slowly over the last few months. Upon disassembling the hard drive, our data recovery team noticed some scratching on the magnetic platters, indicative of a head crash. Head crashes can occur when dust enters the hard drive’s chassis, but in this case, the age of the hard drive was likely more to do with why the heads crashed.

Because the hard drive was an older model, we had to source donor parts from an outside supplier. Our library of spare parts is in excess of 14,000, but unfortunately, there was no compatible donor drive for our data recovery team to work with. We provided a quote to the client, who accepted, and when the donor drive arrived, our team began the data recovery work. The original hard drives platters were swapped over to the donor drive, which was then imaged. We were able to recover around 75% of the client’s data, with much of it lost due to the damage the platters had sustained when the heads crashed. Fortunately for the client, however, this wasn’t much of an inconvenience.

All of our data recovery clients are given a free assessment and no-obligation quote to complete the work, but a small number of the cases we handle require our technicians to order in parts. In this event, we’re still completely transparent, and you won’t incur any costs without approving them first.

Find out more about how the data recovery process works below: