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Western Digital Scorpio
This drive was sent to us by a laptop user who discovered while his drive would power up it would not spin. We opened up the drive in our clean-room a...more>> |
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Western Digital Caviar
This drive, which was inside a family computer, was accidentally formatted by an enthusiastic (but well-intentioned) brother-in-law trying to repair t...more>> |
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Toshiba Laptop Drive
This drive would power up but make no noise except a barely audible ticking noise. The problem was caused by a failed drive heads. As the exact part w...more>> |
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Seagate Momentus
Problem: Seized Ball Bearings. The owner was a corporate user who had erroneously believed his laptop's backup system to the company's server was work...more>> |
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Seagate Barracuda
Desktop PC drive which experienced a power surge during an electrical storm, the electrical surge caused drive stiction and electronic damage.more>> |
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Seagate Barracuda
This drive's firmware had failed. The drive belonged to the vice-president of a semi-state body, and contained important data which had not been backe...more>> |
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Diamondmax Plus
Failed drive heads. User needed to recover several hundred Autocad files along with Word, Excel, Outlook and TAS books files. The Autocad files contai...more>> |
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SCSI Drive
This drive, along with 3 others of identical type and size was part of a RAID 5 array. The business in question was only performing sporadic backups. ...more>> |
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Deskstar
This drive would spin up but was invisible to the host system's BIOS. Using our diagnostic utilities we found the NVRAM chip on the controller board o...more>> |
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SCSI Drive
This drive along with 3 others of the same type was part of a failed RAID 5 array. The RAID array belonged to an accountancy practice who stored a sub...more>> |
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Laptop Harddrive
Failed drive heads. Owner needed 4 and a half years of .jpeg (photo) files extracted from this drive, as well as his Excel, Word and .PDF documents. R...more>> |
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Fire Damaged Harddrive
A PCB board badly damaged by heat and smoke.more>> |
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Fire Damaged Harddrive
Desktop PC drive, belonging to a school office, which was gutted by fire. School rolls, accounts and payroll records were all stored on this drive. Th...more>> |
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drive opened with excessive force
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Adata External Drive
This Adata drive, even with its ''protective'' casing had incurred shock damage after being stowed at the bottom of a flight case. The flight case was...more>> |
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Apple Time Machine
backup device front side view. more>> |
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Apple Time Machine
Inside this Apple time machine - this Hitachi 1TB drive had a failed NVRAM chip on its PCB board. We acquired an exact match donor board. Using a spec...more>> |
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Generic USB stick
This USB memory stick was connected to a laptop which accidentally fell off a coffee table. The force of the impact resulted in a broken USB connector...more>> |
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Corsair USB drive
When inserted into a computer, this USB drive showed 0 bytes of data. Our diagnosis revealed a failed controller chip. Using a micro de-soldering proc...more>> |
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RAID Drives
These drives were taken from a RAID 5 HP server. One of the drives had failed. We first imaged all the healthy drives as a precautionary measure. We t...more>> |
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Samsung 1TB 3.5" Drive
This Samsung drive was taken from a small office file server. It contained six 12GB .PST Outlook files that contained nearly 4 years worth of emails b...more>> |
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Freecom External Hard Drive
This Freecom drive containing a Hitachi 320GB Travelstar drive had defective drive heads. In our cleanroom, we removed the defective head disk assembl...more>> |
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Generic USB memory stick
This generic brand flash drive had a USB connector which was flexing. We removed the PCB from its casing. On closer examination under our microscope w...more>> |
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Lacie Rugged Drive
When connected to a PC, this Lacie Rugged drive would start buzzing and then spin down again. Our diagnostics revealed that the drive's spindle motor ...more>> |
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MicroSD Card
This microSD card from a Panasonic Lumix camera appeared unformatted when inserted in a camera or connected to a computer. We performed a RAW data rec...more>> |
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San Disk Cruzer USB
This SanDisk cruzer USB drive appeared totally dead when inserted into the USB port of a computer. Our diagnosis revealed the controller had failed. T...more>> |
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Seagate External Hard Drive
When plugged into a computer, this external Seagate drive (running a Momentus 500GB S-ATA drive) would click persistently. We diagnosed the problem as...more>> |
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Sony USB memory stick
This drive appeared totally dead to any computer it was connected to. Our diagnostics revealed a failed drive controller. We removed the casing and mi...more>> |
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TDK memory stick
The ROM chip on this TDK memory stick had failed. This meant all the wear levelling data and NAND programming algorithms had been lost. After some ext...more>> |
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Toshiba Laptop Drive
This drive was taken from a six month old Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop. The drive stopped working for no apparent reason. The drive would spin up for ...more>> |
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Toshiba Portable Drive
This Toshiba 2.5'' drive would make faint clicking noises when inserted into a computer. The user also informed us that the drive was fully encrypted ...more>> |
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Trekstor External Drive
This drive was accidentally dropped by a user working in a Dublin engineering company. The Seagate drive inside it had defective heads as a result of ...more>> |
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Verbatim External Hard Drive
This drive owned by a professional photographer. This drive was nearing full capacity so he synched the drive with another (higher capacity) drive whi...more>> |
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Fujitsu Laptop recovery
This hard disk was taken from a Toshiba laptop which had incurred impact damage after a fall from a coffee table. The flying-height of the drive heads...more>> |
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HGST Firmware recovery
This 4TB HGST hard drive was taken from an G-Stor external hard drive enclosure. It contained a complete Time Capsule backup for one iMac system. ...more>> |
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Seagate Disk Recovery
This 3.5" S-ATA 4000GB Seagate belonging to a professional photographer was not being recognised by his system (an Apple iMac). Our diagnosis determin...more>> |
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Toshiba Hard Disk Repair
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This Western Digital Caviar drive came from a Lenovo workstation. The drive was riddled with bad sectors. Drive was imaged, data rebuilt and extracted...more>> |
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This Hitachi drive was extracted from a Dell laptop and was totally dead when connected to our recovery system. Our diagnosis revealed a failed NVRAM ...more>> |
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This Verbatim USB was being used by a small business to store all their Sage accounts and inventory data. The NAND memory chip had gone corrupt. We us...more>> |
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This Western Digital Scorpio Black drive came from a HP Probook laptop. The whole drive was encrypted using McAfee Encryption. During diagnosis, it wa...more>> |
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User got 'USB not recognised' error message when they inserted this encrypted device into their computer system. Our diagnosis revealed a failed contr...more>> |
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USB flash drive owned by a student. The drive was not recognised when connected to their PC. They had their primary degree thesis stored on it. Proble...more>> |
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The Head Disk Assembly of this Iomega drive was knocked out of alignment by an accidental drop by the user. The head disk assembly was replaced with i...more>> |
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This 500GB Seagate Barracuda Drive was not detected by its system's BIOS. Drive was initiating and then spinning down. The drive had corrupt firmware ...more>> |
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This drive was being used in a Sony Vaio sub-notebook. The user discovered something was wrong when he was repeatedly was getting 'bad block' and 'blu...more>> |
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This drive was being used in a Dell Latitude 400 series laptop. Upon boot-up the system just showed a black screen. The corporate user took it to his ...more>> |
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A business user was using this Toshiba drive as their main conduit between their work laptop and home PC. Unfortunately, for them, one morning they co...more>> |
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The owner of this Seagate drive, a personal user, had almost 4 years of Word, Excel, PDF, and Photos stored on it. An accidental trip over it's AC pow...more>> |
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Drive from an I.T. support company in Limerick. Drive was spinning up but was making a ticking noise. Our diagnosis revealed that one of the heads had...more>> |
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This drive came from a Dell laptop. The user noticed their system running extremely slow and the base of the system was extremely hot for a number of ...more>> |
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The owner of this drive had a complete business plan stored on it. They plugged it in only to get a message that the drive was 'not formatted'. We di...more>> |
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Data recovery microscope
Under the microscope is a 2.5" Toshiba head disk assembly. This electronic microscope uses Carl Zeiss lens and an Olympus optical processor. This enab...more>> |
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Repair electronic damage
A PCB board from a 2.5" S-ATA drive with a failed TVS diode. Diodes prevent electrical stresses reaching critical components such as the drive heads....more>> |
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SD card data retrieval
SD card recovery device which allows for fast diagnosis and ability to create forensic images of FAT and exFAT formatted Secure Digital cards.more>> |
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Adata hard drive recovery
When connected to a computer this 500 gigabyte Adata SH93 external hard drive was not mounting. The error message "you need to format the disk in driv...more>> |
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This 1TB Western Digital My Passport drive stopped working for no apparent reason. The user could hear a "sweeping noise" from inside the case. Our di...more>> |
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Hard drive data recovery transcend
Transcend are better known as manufacturers of USB memory drives but they also produce USB external hard drives. This 500 GB drive was not being recog...more>> |
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Toshiba portable drive recovery
This Toshiba 500GB external drive had firmware failure. More specifically, it's G-List and P-List were corrupt. Our recovery technicians used special ...more>> |
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WD Elements data recovery
This 1TB Western Digital Elements drive got accidentally dropped by it's user whilst it was still on. Drives can normally withstand an operating shock...more>> |
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LaCie Rugged disk
This LaCie Rugged disk had thermal asperities on its platter surfaces. This resulted in debris accumulating under its disk-heads. We removed the Head ...more>> |
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Verbatim External disk
This Verbatim External disk with a Samsung ST1000LM024 S-ATA disk inside had a seized spindle motor. We replaced it’s Nidec spindle motor with a new o...more>> |
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3TB EXT4 formatted WD My Cloud NAS drive
This 3TB EXT4 formatted WD My Cloud NAS drive had some of its folders accidentally deleted by its owner while he was performing a disk cleanup. We use...more>> |
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Toshiba Canvio DTB310
This Toshiba Canvio DTB310 disk was subject to an accidental coffee spill after which it worked fine. However, approximately one month later and the d...more>> |
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1TB My Passport
This 1TB My Passport encrypted with VeraCrypt had two failed disk-heads and multiple firmware issues. We replaced its head-disk assembly in our clean-...more>> |
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encrypted WD Elements disk
This encrypted WD Elements disk failed after having been dropped by the user. The fall resulted in 3 mangled heads which needed replacement. Then we d...more>> |
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2TB Seagate Backup Plus disk
This 2TB Seagate Backup Plus disk was no longer accessible to the host computer. Inside was a Seagate ST2000LM035 disk using Rosewood firmware. Seagat...more>> |
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2TB WD Elements disk
This 2TB WD Elements disk had significant amounts of platter debris which had accumulated under its disk-heads. The Head Disk Assembly had be removed ...more>> |
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WD My Passport
This WD My Passport was causing the Windows 10 host to freeze when connected via USB. This issue was caused by corrupt firmware (translator module). T...more>> |
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Samsung M3 disk
10- This Samsung M3 disk experienced failure on two of its heads (#3 and #4). When connected to a computer, the disk would make a clicking noise and s...more>> |
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WD My Book external drive
This WD My Book external drive had multiple issues. Weak heads, extensive bad sectors (which made the disk’s system area very problematic to read) and...more>> |
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Samsung PM851 Bitlockered SSD
This Samsung PM851 Bitlockered SSD removed from a Lenovo laptop was no longer bootable. In Disk Management, it appeared as unallocated. more>> |
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B/M keyed M.2 SSD
This B/M keyed M.2 SSD belonging to an energy company was removed from a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop. Encrypted with Symantec Endpoint 14.0.3., the bootloa...more>> |
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Intel Pro 2500 SSD
This Intel Pro 2500 SSD belonging to a parish church was subject to a power surge event resulting in some blown diodes on it’s PCB. Once these had bee...more>> |
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SanDisk Ultra
This SanDisk Ultra with a Marvell 88SS1074 controller chip belonging to a manufacturing company was no longer being recognised by Windows Explorer no...more>> |
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Samsung Evo 750 SSD
This Samsung Evo 750 SSD had been retro-fitted to an Apple iMac. After only two years of service, the user was presented with a flashing question mar...more>> |
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Samsung Evo 840
This Samsung Evo 840 (MZ-7TD120) from a laptop running Windows 10 was no longer being recognised by the operating system. The problem was caused by a ...more>> |
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Crucial MX500
This Crucial MX500 was no longer being recognised by Windows. Our diagnostics revealed that its Silicon Motion (SM2258) controller was corrupt. This 1...more>> |
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SK Hynix SC3111
This SK Hynix SC3111 had a problem with its controller (SH87820BB). More specifically, its File Translation Layer was corrupt. The FTL plays a pivotol...more>> |
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PNY CS900 SSD
This PNY CS900 SSD using a SMI 2258H controller had a worn out service area (SA). This is an area of the disk which often stores firmware code needed ...more>> |
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Samsung SSD
This Samsung SSD using a MEX controller was removed from a MacBook Air. The user had accidentally spilled water on the system's keyboard and it seeped...more>> |
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WD Blue using a Marvell 88SS1074 controller
This WD Blue using a Marvell 88SS1074 controller became invisble to the the user's computer and their PC's BIOS. Problem appeared to be a locked contr...more>> |
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