BLOG - From Practice

A Fujitsu MHK2060AT hard drive from the control system of a CNC lathe arrived at our lab with a "Disk boot failure" error. The machine refused to start, and the client needed to recover the system files without which the lathe would not run. A drive from the year 2000 with a mere 6 GB of capacity and an IDE interface belongs to a class of technology that is no longer routinely repaired — but such cases are not uncommon in our lab.

A 2TB WD My Book external drive arrived at our lab making grinding and clicking noises. We deal with mechanical damage every day – but not every drive arrives in its original state. This one had already been opened by someone before it reached us, and the situation was far from ideal.

Some SSDs fail suddenly and without warning, others manifest themselves through gradual deterioration in readability. The second scenario brought a Patriot P210 with 512 GB capacity to our lab. The customer described a situation where the drive would initialize correctly, but after reading roughly half a gigabyte of data it stopped responding. A classic symptom of NAND memory degradation.

A client came to us with an external Verbatim SSD that had already spent some time at another data recovery lab. The quote he received there – high price, long turnaround, 95% success rate – led him to seek a second opinion. When we connected the drive, it showed no response whatsoever. As far as the diagnostic system was concerned, the drive simply wasn't there.

A Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra appeared to be working at first glance. It powered on, displayed the logo, and a few seconds later restarted on its own. Over and over, in an endless loop. The owner was primarily concerned about photos and videos that were completely inaccessible in this state.

A two-drive Western Digital NAS ended up in our lab after it stopped displaying stored data. The owner tried to fix the situation himself – he formatted one of the drives – but instead of a fix, data access became completely impossible. This case illustrates well why it's better not to make hasty decisions when dealing with RAID arrays.

A notebook drive Western Digital WD5000BEVT stopped being detected – a classic scenario that could mean anything from a minor service data issue to severe mechanical damage. This case fell into the latter category.

We received an interesting case on our workbench: a compact industrial computer used as a control unit for a production line. Its system drive had failed, and because it ran Windows Embedded Standard 7, which could no longer boot, the machine came to a complete halt. The control application could not start, and production stopped.

NAS — network-attached storage — devices are now a common part of households and smaller businesses. They serve as central storage, backup and multimedia libraries. Although they offer a degree of data safety thanks to RAID arrays, situations can arise where all data suddenly becomes inaccessible. This is exactly what happened to the user of this Netgear NAS.

Some form of electronic failure (PCB) in hard drives is not uncommon. The problem may lie in the PCB itself, it can be caused by user-induced mechanical damage, or it may involve a combination of issues where the PCB isn't the main culprit, but its technological intricacies still need to be navigated. This particular drive required PCB modifications; fortunately, the data platters and read/write heads were intact.