A client approached us with a Samsung Evo 860 solid-state drive that wasn’t being recognised by their machine. Our SSD recovery team were able to recover all of the client’s data.
As soon as the SSD arrived in the data recovery lab, it was catalogued and given a unique job reference number, which followed the device throughout its time with us. The client explained to one of our team that their laptop would initially boot up, but then linger on the log in screen for a few seconds, before restarting. Due to this, the data on the SSD was inaccessible to the client. The SSD in question was a Samsung Evo 860, with a storage capacity of 250GB; around 100GB of data was stored on the drive.
When your machine boots up, it will search for a drive to read from, typically a hard disk drive (HDD) or a solid-state drive (SSD). When a hard drive fails, diagnosing the problem is often fairly easy, because they contain moving parts. For example, there may be a strange noise emanating from within the drive, indicating a physical fault like a head crash or spindle motor failure. On the other hand, SSDs contain no moving parts, so diagnosing physical faults often requires a more detailed inspection.
Upon inspection, there appeared to be no sign of electrical damage, for example from a sudden power surge, to the SSD’s controller chip. Our team discovered that a logical failure with the SSD’s firmware was responsible for the problem. The client was informed, and given a no-obligation quote, and upon giving the go-ahead, our SSD recovery team then began work on the drive. Each of the drive’s chips were then removed from the SSD, and file system structures were used to construct an image of the drive. Once this disk image was built, data could be recovered in much the same manner as with an HDD. All of the client’s data was recovered – around 100GB in total – which was returned on a blank external hard drive.
