This 500GB HGST HTS545050A7E362 MacBook Pro laptop drive came to us from a shop nearby in Wichita. They had a customer that brought the MacBook in and said it had just stopped working without warning. The repair shop was able to quickly narrow the issue down to the HGST hard drive itself which has an Apple part number 655-1730G.
Bad Blocks Data Recovery
The repair shop tested the drive by plugging it into some of their own machines that they use to extract data from drives, but the machines would not mount the drive. The customer was informed the drive was the issue and quoted for a repair. The customer let the shop know that they needed the data from the old drive, as there were photos and work documents present that they didn’t want to leave behind.
The Wichita computer repair shop recommended us for the recovery as we are close by Wichita and offer affordable recovery with a very high success rate. We usually find ourselves in Wichita once a week, so if you are in the Wichita area but don’t want to make the drive to us, just let me know and I will see if I can come by to pick up the project.
HTS545050A7E362 Diagnosis
Once I had the drive in my possession, I started with a full diagnosis. It is always important to start every diagnosis from scratch, even if the drive has already been looked at by others. The information you may notice during the diagnosis stage could be different than the last technician. I have found that it is always a good idea to be more thorough rather than less in the data recovery industry.
In this case, the head stack and platters looked great, so I continued to check for firmware issues and see if I could get access to the sectors on the drive. Eventually, I narrowed down the cause of the issue to bad sectors (sometimes referred to as bad blocks). In this case, the bad sectors were in areas of the drive that needed to be readable in order for the drive to show up on a computer at all. Because these areas were not responding properly, the drive would not show up on a standard computer when plugged in.
Imaging the HGST hard drive
I prepared the drive for imaging by turning off all the features that can interfere with the imaging process. Then I started the imaging process with a quick and gentle first pass. This first pass finished pretty quickly and I had over 90% of the sectors recovered. For the next 2 days, I set progressively more intense imaging passes to get every sector possible. By the end of the 2 days, I was confident I had gotten back everything possible with over 99.9999% of the sectors being recovered.
All the important data the customer wanted was recovered and they seemed very pleased to have their photos and work documents back safe and sound. All the data had its folder structure as well as file names intact.
Nationwide Affordable Data Recovery
I offer data recovery services nationwide via my mail-in recovery service. If you have a drive that just stopped working and you need to get the data off of it, please give me a call to discuss the recovery at (620) 615-6836, or fill out my online quote form to get a free quote. I look forward to helping you get your data back.
Drive info: HDD: Z5K500-500 HTS545050A7E362 500GB 2.5inch P/N: 0J38085 MLC: DA5754 SEP-14
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