Skip to main content

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.

Hard Disk Recovery

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave a comment on this data recovery blog

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Reponding Toshiba Drives

Toshiba Laptop Data Recovery Some problems have been found with Toshiba Laptop drives where the computer will fail with any of the following symptoms .. The drive hangs during boot Unable to access data Computer is very slow Problem with Drives We found the problem which is related to the G-List ( Grown defect list )it either becomes corrupt or is not readable. If it is not readable by the drive then the correct translator algorithms can not be run and so the drive slows down or even stops completely. Solution to Toshiba Hard Disk Problem. The solution is very complex and requires specialist equipment to enable rebuilding of the defect maps externally to the drive. However, once this is achieved the data can be accessed and a near perfect recovery is possible. For more information on this problem please visit our Toshiba Data Recovery pages.
Post a Comment
Read more

Laptop Data Recovery

A large number of computers sold are laptop computers. They are light and portable. Modern laptops contain very large hard disks at the time of writing this article 500Gb are often seen here for data recovery. One of the most common problems we see are drives where the heads have crashed. The main cause is actually part of the design of the computer - remember the bit where I said 'they are light and portable'? It is easy to put the computer on your lap, then when you need to get up, lift the computer up and put it to one side. This movement can cause a head crash especially if the heads are reading or writing at the time. Most manuals that we have seen recommend putting the computer on a firm surface like a desk or a table and in fact NOT putting it on your lap - strange that they are called 'laptops' when it is not recommended to use them as such. Some manufacturers have developed hardware that detects when the computer is being moved and pulls the heads to a saf...
Post a Comment
Read more