Western Digital Hard Drive Pricing

We are asked all the time which are the best hard drives to use? Since we are a hard drive recovery company we get to see all the major hard drives up close and personal. While there are certainly some hard drives that we see more often, that is more... 

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System Area Of The Hard Disk A Look At A Partition

So here is the deal, I would say in about 99 percent of the calls I take, I talk about the “System Area Of The Hard Drive” and I am sure that must seem like techno babble to most people. Because of the specialization of this field of technology,... 

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Remote Logical Hard Drive Recovery

I have over the past few years had customers with hard drives that I knew I could fix their problem easily if I just had access to the drive. In these situations I will usually offer the customer a logical recovery, which entails them sending us the hard... 

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My Data Failure Nightmare, The Beginning

So here is the deal, recently I  have been having serious data issues. Like a bad dream it would seem I have lost my main data areas in three different machines in the last 4 months. On a side note one of the machines (my main one) lost its hard drive... 

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Partition Types in a Soft Spanned Set

  Last time I explained the basic premise of a spanned set.  I used the example of a clients RAID that contained 3 36 GB SCSI drives. In a standard set each one of the drives would use one partiton for the entire drive and then the set would be mounted... 

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When good RAIDs Go Bad, A Technicians Worst Nightmare

The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data” area of the... 

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What File System Components are affected by FDISK

As I have mentioned before we have all either by design or by accident fdisked an NTFS file system. In doing so all of the files become inaccessible and the assumption for many years was that they could not be recovered. Many of the more recent pieces... 

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When My Main Gaming Machine Has Serious Hard Drive Crash

Ok so here is what I have, 3 broken machines, all with bad hard drives. I am not talking about a little logical damage to the drive where recovery is a possibility with software. Oh no these are full blow physical recoveries. In machine one I have a RAID... 

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Recovering from Accidental FDISK using Free Software

Like many of us I have accidentally used ‘fdisk’ to partition a drive that I had never intended to. Whether it be adding a new drive, repartitioning and formatting a USB device, or just trying to reload the operating system there has been... 

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