MJM Data Recovery

Seagate Data Recovery Back in 2008 Seagate introduced the 7200.11 F3 series of drives, the range was from 160 GB up to 1500 GB and later 2 GB. Soon after, these drives developed a firmware bug that totally bricked the hard disks. Seagate forums were overflowing with tales of woe. Seagate brought out a firmware update that fixed the problem, but the drive needed to be working to apply it. There was another problem, the firmware fix actually bricked working drives - but only a specific model was affected with the update. Seagate were then forced to provide free data recovery on this model, but left the rest to their own devices. At one point someone made some termminal commands available that could fix the SMART logs and translator problem that cause the 0 MB problems on some of the drives so then they could then run the firmware update. Thanks to that guy many users were able to recover their data. When Seagate bought out the 7200.12 and some later Laptop versions, there wa...

Complete disassembly of a hard disk. A transfer and minor update from an article on our old website. This article does a complete disassembly of a hard disk drive describes each component and what heir function is. Five separate interlinked sections describe An overview of the hard disk to be dismantled Gives a description of the drive and shows the difference between good and bad platters The Head Stack Assembly Shows each part of the head stack and describes their functionality within the drive. The Electronics PCB of the hard disk An brief explanation  of the functions of the PCB on a hard disk drive. The Motor How the motor is controlled and the bearing mechanics. The platters. Describes the manufacture of platters.  The article can be found here. Disassembly of a Hard Disk

How ATA Registers Work After some requests from users we have started restoring some of the technical pages we had on our website. There were a few on our old website that are being converted from the old site tro the new one. The latest one is the page that describes how the ATA registers work on a hard disk drive. With explanations of the purpose of their functions and has been updated to include 48 bit LBA addressing., The page can be found at : https://www.mjm.co.uk/articles/how-hard-disk-ata-registers-work.html We are also in the process of building some technical videos showing exactly what goes on when accessing hard disks.

Another busy weekend updating the information on our RAID pages. Added some new pages and text. Recovering data from raid arrays is a complex problem that requires complex software, we started developing our own raid recovery software back in the early 2000's We are now a market leader for raid data recovery and can recover from the most complex of raid systems, including EMC Isilon SAN and EqualLogic systems. Full details of our raid recovery service is available at our website .. Raid Recovery For more information about us please follow the link to our main site here: Data Recovery Services

We have recently made a major update to our NAS Recovery pages on our website at www.mjm.co.uk/nas-data-recovery/nas-recovery.html We have included pages for Buffalo Linkstation and TeraStation Drobo Systems Netgear ReadyNAS Recovery Netgear SC101 and SC101T Recovery Qnap NAS Data Recovery Synology NAS Recovery Thecus Data Recovery Western Digital NAS Recovery  Quite a few pages added with information about NAS Recover from all above. Next is major update for RAID pages to include several new Server pages.

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 s...

Fake Memory Cards. After seeing countless fake memory cards received for data recovery, we decided to write some software to help users determine if they have a fake memory or genuine memory card. The problem with the fakes is that they are so good, they actually appear to have the advertised storage space and it even seems that the full amount of data can be written. The only problem, is that the data overwrites some of the existing data rendering the older data useless. Our experiments indicate that (at least with the devices we tested) that the files and folder structures seem to be OK as they list as expected. The problem comes when the memory reaches its true physical limit. At that time, the data starts overwriting at the end of the card. As the file system information is updated, as normal there is no way of knowing, until you open a file that has been overwritten. It has gone, and unfortunately is most likely not recoverable.  Of course there will be exceptions to thi...