I received a call regarding a Samsung ST1000LM024 hard drive with bad sectors that needed to be recovered while at the Kansas State Fair with my boys (enjoying some D&J Pronto Pup). It was a referral from a local computer repair shop for a drive that they were not able to access the data. The drive belonged to a small business that does carpet cleaning, so they needed it recovered to get their business data back as quickly as possible.
The repair shop had attempted a recovery using software based methods but was not successful in getting any usable data from the drive. The shop recommended my services as an affordable alternative to the expensive data recovery service they were quoted by another larger data recovery lab.
Samsung ST1000LM024 Recovery
The Samsung drive was a 1TB laptop drive with model number ST1000LM024. I was able to test the heads with the PC-3000 and they did test as good. Doing a random read test across the drive I found there were areas with bad sectors present. In order to continue with this bad sector recovery, I started by preparing the drive for imaging. Configuring these drives for the imaging process includes turning off features that would cause the drive to try to mitigate the bad sectors it runs into.
Bad Sectors
When a drive has bad sectors, the general idea is to target the files that are most important first with an easy pass. This allows you to get the most important data back first without stressing the drive. Once those files are being targeted you want to do a fast and easy pass to get all the sectors back that you can without stressing the drive.
At this point after two easy passes, I had 99% of the sectors recovered. The next pass I set as a harder pass where I could get back more of the sectors that were missed during the first easy pass on the important data. Then I finally set up a pass that may stress the drive but will get back as much data as possible. Once all the data that is important has been recovered as much as possible, you continue with the same process to recover the rest of the drive.
Imaging the hard drive
In this case, after a few passes with the imager, I was able to get 100% of the sectors on the drive imaged! It took a while for the passes to complete, but after a few days, I had gotten all the sectors recovered from the drive. Once the imaging was complete, I found there was partition corruption on the drive as well. Likely the drive started to fail and wrote incomplete catalog data which caused the corruption I was seeing.
Recovering the important business documents
Running a couple of different scans with my data recovery software brought back all the data with folder structure intact. I was also able to get back some files that had been deleted in the past as well as system and program files.
Once the data recovery software was done running, I moved all the recovered data to the new drive provided by the customer and dropped off the recovered data directly to the local business. They were very pleased to get their data back and be able to run their business again right away.
Affordable data recovery options exist!
If you need help getting the data back for your business, please fill out a quick quote form and I will get back to you right away about your drive. Or feel free to give us a call and discuss your project over the phone.
Drive info: Samsung Model: ST1000LM024, HDD P/N: HN-M101MBB/M2, P/N: 665259-003, SAMSUNG SPINPOINT MOMENTUS, DOM: 06/2014, SITE: DGT, F/W: 2BA30001, REV. C, PRODUCT OF CHINA
About Author
