Data Recovery Resources and RAID How To Guides
Hard drive recovery and data recovery resource center with how to guides for RAID, NAS, file system repair
Common Toshiba Hard Drive Failures All mechanical devices will fail sooner or later. Hard drives fail for various reasons. We will describe what we find to be the most common cause of failure with Toshiba hard drives. In the last decade, the … [Read more...]
Hard Drive Problem #1: The hard drive is not showing up in “My Computer†or in Windows Explorer (not to be confused with internet explorer). Generally, I get phone calls where the customer states that the computer is no longer seeing their … [Read more...]
As Hurricane Irene approaches our shores we thought it a good idea to revisit the topic of how to package your hard drive for shipment after it has been submerged in water. This is a very important topic and we covered it in depth during an interview … [Read more...]
Among other duties I have around here finding parts for drives is one of them. We of course out source to other companies when I am unable to find the parts but it is always better and more more cost effective if someone in house finds them. The … [Read more...]
This might be the most popular drive sold in the past 5 years. It is fast and the storage capacity for the bang for your buck was huge! When they first came out you couldn’t get anything close in size for the pennies Western Digital was asking for … [Read more...]
Over the years we have discussed my progress in data recovery. I have recently integrated the physical recovery end in to my ever growing knowledge base. It used to be that when I spoke to customers and friends I was coming purely from a logical … [Read more...]
One of the most common problems facing computer users is a failed hard drive. We see all types of failed hard drives, but the most common fatal problem revolves around broken heads. If there are any issues with the platters, often times it will be … [Read more...]
Below are some more fun Q&A about hard drive recovery. I have given what I think is the best solution to these problems. As always please leave a comment if you have a question or contact me directly at 727-345-9665 ext 236. Question: I … [Read more...]
So I trolled the Internet for topics to write about and found tons of forums with very good questions not being answered so I am going to post the questions and then give you the best possible answer I cam up with. Q: Yesterday I was cleaning out … [Read more...]
A common misunderstanding is that because a hard drive is not a boot drive it does not have or need a boot sector, this just isn't the case. All DOS based (Windows) hard drives have a boot sector. It is often also confused with the MBR (Master Boot … [Read more...]
When a hard drive is damaged it almost always comes down to one of two things that are wrong. Either the electronics are bad or the heads have failed. Damaged hard drive recovery involves repairing the parts that are broken and then accessing the … [Read more...]
Ok so the most popular external drives on the market have to be the My Book and The Passport. I get a ton of calls every week about them, and I don't believe it is because it is not a good product but more because they are being SO widely used. So … [Read more...]
If you have had a hard drive problem then sure enough you have done some searching on the Internet and seen some startling revelations about hard drive recovery. My personal favorite is :it is safe to put your hard drive in the freezer over night"! … [Read more...]
And in this corner... The hard drive Storage Wars have been heating up lately as Western Digital and Seagate battle it out for not only the largest capacity disks, but they are also going green! Western Digital went as far as to name it's new 2TB … [Read more...]
So here is a little tutorial on how to remove a laptop hard drive. I only have Dell's in my little arsenal but the method should be the same across the board no matter what laptop you have. The only exception I will make that is with the dell I use … [Read more...]
This is the first article in a series that will explain how hard drives work, why they fail and what you as users can do to protect your data. When looking at hard drives the first step is to identify what it's form factor is. Simply put, the form … [Read more...]
 Okay, I know this is not about how to read bad parity in a drive in order to find a stale drive in a RAID five. This is an important subject, however, and I also think it is important to know why heat and a swelling platter can cause hard drive … [Read more...]
So here is the deal, recently IÂ 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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]