The user tried to access the disk on several computers, but kept on receiving a message that their disk was “not accessible” followed by a message “You need to format the disk in drive E: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?” We opened up the plastic enclosure and found a Samsung HM100UI 2.5” 1TB disk.
We attached it to our recovery systems. The MBR (Master Boot Record) could not be read at all. Further diagnostics revealed that one of the disk-heads was not reading. Using firmware manipulation tools, we disabled the faulty head and used specialised equipment to image the NTFS volume in PIO mode (a very slow data transfer mode). The files needed by the client Excel files and .DSS audio files from their Olympus dictaphone were all successfully recovered.