There are certain scenarios where bad sectors can really cause a lot of problems. In most bad sector cases, the data that is not stored in the failing sectors is easily retrieved by the owner of the drive, and many times they don’t even know they have an issue with their drive until they try to move files off of it that are stored in the area of the drive with the failing sectors. In this ST31000528AS iMac recovery case, the bad sectors on this Seagate hard drive caused the drive to not show up on the client’s computer, and even a computer repair shop couldn’t get any usable data from it.
iMac stops responding
The call came from a customer that had brought their Apple iMac into a computer repair shop when their drive had stopped responding out of the blue. Instead of booting the iMac was just showing a white screen. The Seagate ST31000528AS drive from inside the iMac would not mount on any of the repair shop’s equipment, even after they physically removed the drive from the iMac.
The computer repair shop referred the client to us for Mac data recovery. This repair shop has sent clients to us in the past when they are not able to recover a drive, and we have had good success providing affordable data recovery services to their clients. The drive in this case had very important photos and word documents that the customer needed to recover.
Diagnosing ST31000528AS iMac Recovery
Once I received the drive, I connected it to my PC-3000 by Ace Labs to diagnose the issue. The drive did get Ready and ID properly, so I was able to enter the drive utility and complete everything necessary firmware wise to make for the smoothest imaging process possible. The heads did test as good, so I knew I was very likely dealing with a bad sector scenario on this drive.
Imaging the hard drive
The first pass did pretty well, but I did see there were some areas with bad sectors. I completed additional passes with the imager, with each pass being more and more intense for the drive. The idea with this imaging process is to start by getting back everything that is easy to get back, then work your way up to getting back as much as possible. You don’t want to stress the hard drive right off the bat by trying to get everything on the first pass.
FileVault recovery
After the imaging passes, I was able to successfully recover 99.9999% of the sectors on the hard drive. This was a great result! The drive had Apples FileVault enabled, so all the data was encrypted. I requested the password from the customer and was able to mount the image of the drive without issue once I entered the correct password.
Cost of recovery
All the data was intact and the customer was very pleased to get back their important data. Because the drive had encryption, this ST31000528AS iMac recovery was covered under our Standard+ recovery tier. This affordable data recovery pricing tier covers drives that don’t require internal parts replacement during recovery.
Start your iMac recovery
If you have a Mac drive (or any drive) that needs to be recovered, please contact me either over the phone at (620) 615-6836, send me an email, or request a quote. I look forward to helping you get the data off your hard drive.
Drive Info: Seagate ST31000528AS Firmware: AP4C Date Code: 11362 1000GB P/N: 9SL154-046 655-1565D
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