BLOG - From Practice

The hard drive exhibited typical symptoms of read head and/or data platter failure - it clicked and shut down after a while. The failure occurred without an obvious cause - spontaneously. Western Digital hard drives are usually relatively well manageable when such an error occurs and the cause is not mechanical damage. However, it is necessary to check the condition of the data platter surfaces.

Replacing an iPhone screen might seem easy for a handy person. Unscrew a few screws, replace the screen, screw them back in, and... something snaps. An incorrect screw in the wrong place can mechanically damage the motherboard (PCB), turning a simple screen replacement into a complicated data recovery task. But how can a wrong screw mechanically damage an iPhone to such an extent that the problem seems unsolvable even for some specialized companies?

Many users use external hard drives for various purposes. They serve to store expendable data that we can afford to lose in case of drive failure, but also important data that should be stored in at least two copies. Neglecting backups can sometimes backfire at an inconvenient time, and the external drive fails. The age of the drive, how it is handled, and other factors can cause the drive to fail to connect. In the best-case scenario, the drive turns on, makes no unusual sounds, but the data is inaccessible. This was exactly the case here.

The system disk in the computer failed, the computer stopped booting, and the user's data became inaccessible. When connected to another computer, the SSD was reported as RAW. Initial data recovery attempts by a regular IT service were unsuccessful, prompting the user to turn to us. The main issue with the SSD was the high error rate of the memory chips, which caused the file system to collapse. By combining multiple reading and data correction methods, we were able to recover most of the data from the SSD.

The Huawei phone came to us for diagnostics after a home attempt at data recovery. Fortunately, the user's intervention was not too severe, but it highlights the fact that attempting to recover data from a phone at home is not advisable. The phone had a damaged motherboard, destroyed battery, and a broken display. For phones with the Android operating system, it is crucial that the memory chip and processor are not damaged. Luckily, this was not such an extensive defect.

A Western Digital hard drive manufactured in 2009 served well in a laptop for a long time. When it was time to upgrade to an SSD, it continued to serve the user as an external USB drive. However, 14 years is a long time, which can manifest various issues. This drive, in addition to minor surface defects on the data platters, also exhibited a failure of one read head. Such a fault can make all user data inaccessible.

Hard drives have been storing our data for decades. This particular one served well for over 10 years, and if not for an unexpected power failure disrupting the symbiotic hum of its read heads and data platters, it probably would have had a few more years of service left. This older Seagate model has an obsolete configuration where the read heads don't have a safe zone outside the data platters, but instead rest in the middle of the platters. Normally, the heads would retract to this area when powered off, but in this case, they got "stuck" on the data platters. Initially, data recovery didn't look very promising, but it was ultimately successful.

A miniature SSD with a capacity of 256GB. This and many similar SSDs serve as the system disk in most modern computers and contain important, yet often unbacked-up, data. One day, the laptop simply failed to boot the operating system, leaving the user in a difficult situation. However, this story has a happy ending because the failure was not so severe that the data was unrecoverable.

Flash drives, SD cards, SSDs, mobile phones, and other memory media based on NAND memory chips are considered mechanically more durable, and sometimes people assume that such media cannot fail. This case is proof that a fall can destroy a hard drive just as easily as a "non-mechanical" flash drive.

Inside the plastic case was a Toshiba brand disk which one day betrayed its user, resulting in lost data access. The seemingly spontaneous failure could have been due to an impact or fall that the user was unaware of or had forgotten. However, the failure could also have been truly spontaneous, i.e., a material defect. This defect was not fatal for the disk and data but required a relatively technologically complex procedure.