Month: February 2019

We were recently helping a customer solve an issue with an inaccessible Maxtor M3 (Model HX-M201TCB/GMR) disk which was showing a flashing blue light when connected to a PC. The disk made a healthy spinning noise but was not appearing in Windows explorer. Much to the dismay of the user, a university lecturer, over 3 years worth of PowerPoint presentations were not appearing.

Inside the Maxtor enclosure, we found a Seagate disk which was no surprise as the Maxtor brand is owned by Seagate. The first problem we discovered with the disk was an overflowing G-List. This an area of the firmware designated for recording bad sectors. Using specialised data recovery equipment which can manipulate the disk at firmware level, we cleared this list. Next problem was the 19,872 bad sectors. We programmed our recovery system to read the disk allowing for a read-delays of up to 900 milliseconds. We also programmed our system to read the disk using a block size of just 60 sectors per read. This would allow us to maximise the chances of the best possible recovery for the client.

Now with an image of disk, we programmed our system to image the disk in reverse mode. This covers areas which the forward disk-read passes would have ignored. On completion, the bad sector count had been whittled down to just 944.

17GB of PowerPoint lectures (.PPTX files) were recovered and reunited with the delighted user.  

Need to recover files from a Maxtor M3 external hard disk in Ireland? Drive Rescue have been recovering data since 2007 and can help you. Visit www.datarecoverydublin.ie for more information. Or call us on 1890 571 571.

Data Recovery from Seagate Laptop Thin HDD

Last week Drive Rescue recovered data from this hard disk which was removed from a Dell laptop. The disk had a seized spindle (see previous blog post for another Seagate disk with a seized spindle, the recovery process was similar).

The user’s IT support team from a company in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim came to us for assistance because the Seagate disk was making a buzzing noise when trying to initialise.  

Even after recovery, the volume was still inaccessible because the disk was encrypted with TrueCrypt (AES 256 in XTS mode).  However, after the user had emailed us the encryption key, we decrypted the disk and were able to mount the NTFS formatted volume.  All of their Solid Edge (.IGS and .IGES) design files were successfully recovered.

Need to recover data from a Seagate Laptop Thin HDD? Drive Rescue are based in Dublin, Ireland and offer a complete data recovery service for Seagate laptop hard disks. www.datarecoverydublin.ie