Western Digital My Book Problem Question and Answer

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 have a 1TB... 

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Data Recovery Forum Questions Answered PST Recovery and Hard Drive Not Detected

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 the... 

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How To Remove A Laptop Hard Drive

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... 

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Hard Drive Form Factors Explained

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... 

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How platter swelling affects a hard drive

  Okay, I know this is not about how to read bad parity in a drive in order to find a the stale drive in an RAID five.  This is an important subject, however, I also think it is important to know why heat and a swelling platter can cause hard drive... 

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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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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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Slave A Laptop Hard Drive To USB

This article and video will show you how to use a USB enclosure to slave a laptop hard drive. Many times laptop – notebook hard disk drives come in here that we are able to recover with data recovery software. This video will help you use a USB... 

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Samsung Spinpoint Being Mass Produced

Last week Samsung announced that it will be mass producing their high capacity laptop hard drives. Their Spinpoint series has either high capacity or high speed, whichever is more important to the individual consumer. Some day soon they will have the... 

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Recovering Data From A Laptop

Last month I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1720 with all the RAM and processing power that I could get. I also picked a 320GB hard drive to store my data files. Being involved with data recovery in one way or another for the last nine years has certainly... 

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Hard Drive Failure Data Recovery

When your hard drive fails it is more than likely a physical problem. In most cases noise will accompany hard drive failure, clicking and scraping are common sounds that a hard drive will emit while it is failing. It is important to back up all your files... 

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Hard Drive Recovery Techniques

Hard drive recovery is one part of the overall process of data recovery. Data recovery involves many steps that vary depending upon the actual circumstances of the hard drive failure. When the disk is physically damaged it will need to be repaired. This... 

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Hard Disk Data Recovery Overview

Hard Drive Recovery refers to the physical repair of storage media that uses platters and read write heads. A hard drive has many moving parts that can at anytime break down. While it is true we need to repair the disk, we would never want you to use... 

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Data Recovery Tutorial: How to Slave a Hard Drive

This is a tutorial from Jacqui Best about the proper procedure for slaving your hard drive prior to running data recovery software on it. This would also be the procedure to follow if you were to run speed clone to sector clone a noisy drive or if you... 

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Data Recovery: How To Hook Up A Hard Drive

Yesterday I received a call from a gentleman in Alaska. His daughter had built him a new computer and he needed to get his data from his old Windows 98 machine into his new Windows Vista environment. He had called me because my phone number is on our ... 

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Speed Kills? With Hard Drives It’s Heat!

A few months ago I bought an internal thermometer for my computer. I was told by Malcolm our hard drive recovery engineer that the most common reason for hard disk failure was heat. I was shocked to find the internal temperature of my machine was 120... 

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