This last Tax season was a busy time here at Yellow Brick Data Recovery. A lot of people try to get old receipts and other tax related documents off of drives they have been stored in and find there is an issue with the drive. We get drives from all over the country during this time via our mail-in service.
Seagate Data Recovery
A call came in from a client in Colorado who explained their external Seagate hard drive had stopped working suddenly and they needed a Seagate data recovery service so they could access their important files in time for tax season. It was reported that the drive would spin up as it should, but would not be recognized by the computer at all.
The client had even tried removing the ST2000DM001 hard drive from inside the Seagate external enclosure and plugging it directly into a computer. They thought maybe the drive wasn’t receiving enough power or there was some other issue with the hard drive enclosure. Unfortunately, the drive continued to not show up on the computer and the symptoms did not change at all.
Recovering the ST2000DM001 hard drive
Once the Seagate hard drive arrived I started with a quick visual diagnosis. The drive looked great with no signs of issues on the printed circuit board on the bottom of the drive (the PCB) or the drive itself. Plugging the ST2000DM001 hard drive into my PC-3000, I found that the issue on the drive was a firmware issue! For this model, I start by patching the ROM to allow access to turn off the features in the firmware that are causing the issue.
Once the patch is complete I turn off all the features that can interfere with the imaging process and set up the settings on the imager for a gentle first pass. Once the first pass completes I take a look at what areas of the drive were skipped by the imager and change the settings to get back more and more of the missed areas.
With this Seagate data recovery, I was able to get 100% of the sectors on the drive during the first pass! This means that the firmware issues were the only issues with the drive. The heads and platters were working properly, as was the PCB. Even though the issue causing the symptom was fixed, it is still best to not trust the drive. I always recommend replacing a drive that has had issues rather than trusting it again.
Completing the Seagate data recovery
Now that all the sectors had been recovered from the external hard drive, I moved on to the last part of the Seagate data recovery which is scanning the recovered data for the important files the customer needs. Best practice dictates that you turn off MBR which means the imaged drive will not mount when connected to the recovery machine running an OS. Then you use the best recovery program for the particular job to scan for data.
In this case, I used UFS Explorer Pro to scan for files as well as R-Studio. Comparing the results showed there was no partition corruption present! I was able to move all the data with folder structure and file names intact over to a new drive the customer had provided to hold the recovered data.
This successful Seagate data recovery allowed the customer to file their taxes in time for the deadline, and they also got back a bunch more data that will likely need in the future.
Affordable data recovery services
If you need data recovered from an external hard drive, please consider sending the data recovery project to us! Our affordable data recovery services are available nationwide via our mail-in recovery program. Just contact me if you have any questions at all and then start the recovery process by filling out our quick data recovery form.
Thanks for reading!
Drive info: MODEL: Seagate Barracuda, 2000GB, ST2000DM001, PN: 1CH164-021, FW: HP34, Date: 14324, Site: TK, Product of Thailand
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