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Seagate with locked firmware


MjM Data Recovery are now able to unlock firmware on the new Grenada and Lombard series of drives.

When repairing a hard disk prior to recovery it is important to be able to examine and repair bad modules and tables within the firmware of the hard disk.

When firmware problems started appearing in about 2006/2007 the firmware zone on the drive was fully accessible using a TTL terminal adapter to manipulate the firmware, turn features on or off to improve the readability and reset and rebuild corrupt or damaged sections of the firmware.

If this repair can not take place, then the data is not recoverable. With the later Grenada and Lombard drives (the ones with a corner cut-out on the PCB) the firmware is either restricted or entirely locked down - especially on the SES series of Grenada.

We are now in a situation where we can remove these locks temporarily and make a clone of the data. We recently recovered 2 drives from a RAID 5 array where the problem was exacerbated by needing a head swap on one drive and the other had a serious firmware problem in SMART logs.

Attempting to access the firmware on these drives using standard methods resulted with 'Terminal Locked' messages. But once the drives were unlocked using the new technique, we could access the entire firmware zone, make a backup of all ROM, modules and system files, repair them and reload. Once this was done the data became accessible again.

We now offer this service directly to end users and to other Data Recovery companies.

details: https://www.mjm.co.uk/data-recovery-research/seagate-with-locked-firmware.html







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