Toshiba Recovery – Crashed Hard Drive

Toshiba hard drive

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...]

Troubleshooting Basic Hard Drive Problems: Does Not Show Up In My Computer

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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...]

Water Damaged Hard Drive Recovery Shipping

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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...]

Windows Hard Drive Recovery Verification Tool

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE WINDOWS HARD DRIVE RECOVERY VERIFICATION TOOL We receive a tremendous amount of calls asking how to tell if your hard drive is going bad. Sometimes it is very hard to tell if you need hard drive recovery by a … [Read more...]

Finding Hard Drive Parts for an IBM Deskstar 82.3GB

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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...]

Typical Data Recovery Scenario

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Ok so what happens is you have been working on a project, document, database, or maybe even the families genealogy. You have a few weeks of hard work into it. You have put in a ton of internet research and finding just the right pictures.  You get … [Read more...]

What Does CHKDSK Really Do? From a Software Engineers View

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I wish I had a nickel for every potential client that has called the shop and explained to me that they have a hard drive that is locking up (bad sectors usually) and it won’t populate the file system. As I am listening I hear things like “I … [Read more...]

Tutorial: How To Slave A SATA Hard Drive Via USB

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So a few years a ago I wrote a post on how to slave an IDE hard drive internally into a tower. While this is still very useful information, with so many people not having access to the internal tower or with people trying to use their laptops or even … [Read more...]

Western Digital My Book Problem Question and Answer

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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...]

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 … [Read more...]

How To Remove A Laptop Hard Drive

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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...]

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 … [Read more...]

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 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...]

System Area Of The Hard Disk A Look At A Partition

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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, a … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

My Data Failure Nightmare, The Beginning

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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 … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]

When My Main Gaming Machine Has Serious Hard Drive Crash

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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 … [Read more...]

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 more than … [Read more...]

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 … [Read more...]