Today we get a typical case from our customer, that is, part of the data recovered from one Maxtor drive which exist bad sectors is unusable.

This customer says that he has recovered the data, but quite a number of the files are unusable. We think that this may be caused by bad sectors and should be handled with DataCompass. When we connected to this customer’s Pc by remote desktop, he has connected this drive with Maxtor console box, so we do some basic check with MT doctor, some of the sectors can be viewed normal, but some are not. The bad sectors may be terrible.

We asked him to connect this drive to DC device. After that we enabled shadow disk, then open ‘DC device’ in ‘DC Explorer’, there is no partitions found, so we scan the partitions, then got one FAT32 partition, the folders/files in it can be seen also. As this customer has saved a copy of these files, so we changed the settings, tick on ‘Intensive Read’ option, select one folder (about 170MB), recovered this folder to local drive. Compared with previous saved copy of this folder, the new saved files are better. So the rest work is to save other files by this way.

At last, as there are many bad sectors on this drive, part of the data on this drive is corrupt and unrecoverable. We can’t guarantee all the data can be recovered at this situation. What we can do is to recover the data as much as possible.

Tips,

To read the data by ‘Intensive Read’, this will enhance the read ability of disk heads and can read the data on the bad sectors. And this way may hurt the heads when reading bad sectors. So we suggest you recover your data part by part and recover the most important data first.

Case Study for “CE LOG ERROR” Removal

When the HD drive connects to the computer, it can not be identified; if we connect the drive to HD Doctor, it was very slow for identified.

The HDD can be detected but outputs the following error message to the terminal (picture 1).This we called it “CE LOG ERROR”.

There are two ways to repair the problem: Read the rest of this entry »

This is a HD Doctor for WD case study from our domestic client and the screenshots are from Chinese version of HD Doctor for WD. The WD drive can’t be detected (only “0″ in capacity blank and “2″ in head blank), and after diagnosis from HD Doctor for WD, I judge it’s caused by corrupted ROM data. Therefore, I decide to use the option of regenerating ROM data, and finally the drive gets detected and data is back. The following screenshots will explain the whole process.

When I connect to the client’s computer, I found out only some modules are listed. I know maybe the client hasn’t selected ROYL series as drive family and the program directly detect it as Black I.

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Remove Maxtor Drive ATA Password with HD Doctor

Part one: Error Symptom

Sometimes our drive may be protected from normal data area access by HDD password. Look at the following picture; we can see the LBA number was replaced by a special character “drive is protected by password” by connecting the drive to HD Doctor:

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Fix Identification Problem caused by Corruption of ATA Overlay module or ROM content

Similar to Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and/or 7200.12 HDD, Western Digital’s ROYL series also has a typical malfunction- Corruption of ATA Overlay module or ROM content. HDD with that malfunction can not be detected by computer BIOS. The LBA value of the patient drive will be detected as 0 and the only parameter can be detected in the program is the head count. The malfunction is caused by a mismatch of the ROM content in PCB and the ATA overlay module on the platter.

Picture 1 HDD can’t be detected Read the rest of this entry »