Last month we received a crashed 2.5″ 2TB Western Digital hard drive for recovery. We see a lot of these drives but this one was special as it came from one of Canada’s most famous explorers of space .. Chris Hadfield … Canada’s Astronaut!
Chris has a team of support people who help him make decisions and complete his various obligations. When Chris’ hard drive died, his team began reviewing and researching where to send it for data recovery. They contacted a number of their top choices but ultimately chose Memofix Data Recovery Services.
We think they made a wise decision and considering the great 5 star review he gave us, he must have too.
Thanks Chris, your praise and recommendation are very much appreciated.
Memofix Data Recovery Services is looking for a few talented data recovery technicians. If you have a passion for problem solving, an unquenchable lust for knowledge and really enjoy helping people and businesses recover their irreplaceable data, we may have a home for you.
As a data recovery technician, you will join our team of proven data recovery professionals in our quest to become the most technically capable data recovery service company in the world. To become the greatest, we are looking for experts in many areas. We need skilled hard drive surgeons experienced in resuscitating damaged and crashed hard drives. We need PC3000 masters with in-depth knowledge of hard drive system areas (secret OS of the hard drive). And we need file system specialists with an intricate understanding of the various operating systems as well as a thorough understanding of RAID variations and rebuilding techniques.
If you have 2 or more years of experience in the areas listed below, we want to talk to you;
Diagnosing and identifying hard drive problems.
Diagnosing and repairing of defective hard drive PCBs including NVRAM transfers.
Identifying defective heads and replacement techniques in a cleanroom environment.
Dealing with seized spindle motors.
Transplanting of disks into a new body and motor.
Using the PC3000, Data Extractor and other specialized hard drive tools.
Specialized techniques such as individual head imaging.
Performing hard drive hot swaps with a system area compatible donor drive and PCB.
Identifying, repairing and rebuilding file system structure damage in FAT, NTFS, MAC and Linux type operating systems.
Identifying striping schemes and pertinent parameters in various flavors of RAID.
Repairing and Rebuilding RAID arrays physically and virtually using various software tools.
Memofix offers competitive salaries, equal opportunities, a full benefits package, and a wonderful work environment for all of our employees.
If you have the skills, aptitude, and desire to join a team dedicated to becoming the best at recovering the world’s data, please send your resume to me at [email protected]. Please reference “Hero Ad” in your email subject line.
One of our best Toronto data recovery partners recently had a RAID data recovery case involving eight hard disk drives configured in a RAID 5 setup. As you may know, RAID 5 allows the failure of any 1 hard drive and can be rebuilt with no data loss. But unfortunately in this RAID data recovery situation, there were two defective hard drives. Further investigation revealed that one one of the hard drives had actually failed 5 months ago and the stale data residing on it was of no value to the client. This left our data recovery partner with all their hopes pinned on the one remaining defective disc drive which had apparently just failed and was the ultimate reason for their RAID failure.
When they contacted Memofix later that morning, we asked them if there were any loud clicking or other unusual noises coming from the hard disk drive. They said no, but they noted that the hard drive model was not being reported properly by the SCSI BIOS at boot up. The model was displayed properly, BUT the capacity was indicated as 0 bytes!
After conferring with a few of our RAID data recovery techs we advised the client that the problem was most likely a corrupted module in the hard drive’s “system area” and we suggested we could fix it very easily. The “system area” is a storage area on the hard drive reserved by the drive itself for storing unique settings required by the hard drive to function. If a hard drive can’t read some of the modules, it often reports a zero byte size which prevents any access to the stored data.
As we are located in the Toronto area, the partner packaged up the defective hard drive and brought it immediately to Memofix for further analysis. When we first hooked up the drive, there was a very light, almost indecipherable ticking noise. It did not sound serious and in fact our data recovery experts still believed the problem was related to a corrupted system area. However our attempts to repair the module were unsuccessful as the hard drive could not write back the changes we made. It appeared we had an issue with the hard drive’s head assembly that would need to be fixed first. So we opened up the hard drive under class 100 conditions in our Toronto data recovery lab to get a better look. And boy did we get a better look … see the picture we took below. 🙁 Notice the heavily crashed area where the smooth platter surface has been roughed up severely as well as an additional ring of damaged at the inner hub of the platter.
There will be no data recoverable from this crashed hard drive! It just goes to show you that even the best data recovery specialists can be fooled as it’s not always possible to hear severe damage with your ear.
By the way, even though this 8 drive RAID array had two bad hard drives, Memofix was still able to rebuild the RAID with the one stripe being bad throughout the RAID. This results in the recovery of 5 good chunks of data , followed by 1 bad chunk of data through out the volume. The RAID data recovery results may not be exactly stellar but the client was able to regain many smaller document type files.
badly crashed SAS or Serial Attached SCSI hard drive
Last month we received a crashed 2.5″ 2TB Western Digital hard drive for recovery. We see a lot of these drives but this one was special as it came from one of Canada’s most famous explorers of space .. Chris Hadfield … Canada’s Astronaut!
