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Western Digital Specialist Data Recovery

Western Digital ROM Recovery


A recent job received was a Western Digital 2 TB drive. It had been to another data recovery company before we saw it and they were unable to recover.

We examined the drive and found that the processor on the controller card (circuit board)  had failed. Another problem was that the ROM (this device contains information about the drive and is unique to every drive) was embedded in the processor meaning that another technique (aka Hot Swap) has to be applied in an attempt to read the system area on the drive. This gave us access to the system area where we could access the modules used to create a ROM. So far so good.

We then hit another problem, all of the ROM modules were completely empty so it was impossible to rebuild the ROM using standard techniques, this we believe is the reason the other company could not recover.

This did not stop us though, at this stage our senior engineer was given the job and taking the drive we used for the hot swap we extracted the rom code and erased the areas where the unique information was stored. We then looked at the tracks where the SA was stored and using specific variable settings and a small amount of trial and error, we managed to get the ROM rebuilt wrote it to another processor on a working circuit board and recovered every single file on the drive.

This is an example of the lengths that MjM Data Recovery are prepared to go in order to get your data back.

If you have problems with your hard disk or would like a second opinion on a data recovery job, then contact us on 0800 072 3282.

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