Freecom make a popular range of external hard disks which have been on the Irish market for almost 20 years. Recently, a customer delivered to us a Freecom Tough Drive USB 2.0 which was no longer being recognised by any of their computer systems. When connected to their Windows computer, it would make a knocking noise. The disk contained thousands of .JPEG and Sony RAW images – all of which were of extreme sentimental value to our client.
There are many reasons why a Freecom external hard disk may fail to be recognised by a Windows or Apple Mac computer. These include bad sectors caused by damage to the magnetic layers of the platters (due to chips, cracks or due to the build up of debris). These can result in constant I/O errors or “disk is unformatted or disk is unallocated” error messages when the Freecom drive is connected to a host system.
Or, a Freecom drive may develop corruption in the disk’s system (or servo) area. This area contains firmware modules vital for the smooth operation of the disk (such as head-to-track positioning and velocity control information) When these instructional modules become unreadable, your disk will no longer be able to initialise.
A lot of older model Freecom disks (such as Freecom Classic) still use the FAT32 partitioning scheme. This type of partitioning is now finally being deprecated as the de facto file system for external hard disks in favour or NTFS or exFAT. The FAT32 partition table contains information about partition size, cluster size and root directory location. This table also contains metadata pertaining to file attributes such as file names, size and file timestamps. Corruption of your Freecom’s FAT32 partition table can result in your disk becoming inaccessible.
In this particular case, our diagnosis revealed that this Freecom drive (using a Fujitsu 5,400RPM MHY2250BH-ATA disk inside) had developed two faulty disk-heads. (Heads perform the crucial function of reading and writing data to the disk’s platters). Further investigations on this disk revealed that the voice coil motor (VCM) and head disk assembly were unable to get their servo “instructions” from the system area because the damaged heads. Thus, when the disk tried to initialise, it had no instructions on where to position the head disk assembly. Therefore, the actuator arm (on which the heads are mounted), being in a state of limbo, moves frantically across the platters looking for a position whilst generating knocking noises.
We had a replacement head-disk assembly (HDA) already in stock which we replaced in our clean-room. However, even with the HDA replaced and aligning perfectly with the platters, we were still unable to fully access the volume. Our data recovery system could read the disk as far as LBA 23,242,82 and then the volume would be invisible. This will sometimes happen with Fujitsu disks because they have a very temperamental translator. Using our data recovery equipment, pre-loaded with Fujitsu FW modules we were able to regenerate the disk’s translator. We re-powered the disk and finally got access to it’s data!
Drive Rescue offer a complete data recovery service for Freecom external hard disks which are clicking, appearing as unformatted or no longer recognised by your computer. We frequently recover from models such as Freecom Tough Drive 320GB, Freecom Tough Drive 500GB, Freecom Tough Drive 1TB (56057), Freecom Tough Drive 2TB (56331), Freecom Mobile Drive Classic 2.5”, Freecom Mobile Drive MG 500GB Slim, Mobile Drive MG 1TB Slim, Freecom Hard Drive Classic, Freecom Classic 3.0, Freecom Network Drive 1TB, Freecom Network Drive XS and Freecom 29409, 29492, 33708, 33745 and 35610. Your memories and work projects recovered with excellent success rates. Call us on 1890 571 571.