This Scorpio Black Western Digital drive was not showing up for the customer when they tried to access the important photos and work documents that were stored on it. They had initially brought the drive into their local computer repair shop, but the shop told them the drive was not recoverable without advanced lab recovery.
The shop they brought it into used to send people to one of the big data recovery companies. The big recovery company had an average quote of about $1500. When they decided to give us a try and start sending customers to us instead, they were pleased to find that their clients said yes to the recovery 10x more often, and our average recovery quote is closer to $400.
Not only do they end up earning more commission over the year from sending their clients to us (smaller commissions per client, but more clients say yes, so they end up way ahead), but their customers are pleased that they got a referral that saved them a ton of money and also provided them with personalized service.
Diagnosing the WD2500BEKT hard drive
The customer reported that they had accidentally dropped their WD2500BEKT Western Digital drive, then it had started acting up shortly after. The shop they brought it to first told them it was likely an issue with the heads inside the hard drive. Once I received the drive I started with a visual inspection inside my cleanroom.
I am one of the only shops in Kansas that provides in-house cleanroom recovery. Most other data recovery shops will send drives out that need cleanroom recovery to another company. By providing my service in-house I am able to not only recover drives with heads issues and other internal issues, but I am also able to diagnose drives better by opening them and checking everything under my microscope.
In this case, the WD2500BEKT hard drive actually looked great inside. The heads all seemed intact and were not causing damage to the platters. I reassembled the drive with the idea that the drop may have caused a little damage to the area that holds some important firmware information.
Clearing Firmware Issues
My hunch ended up being almost correct. There were firmware issues, in particular Module 32 (which is a common module to get corrupted on this drive), which needed to be cleared. Once the firmware issues were taken care of I was able to get access to the sectors on the platters. A heads test using my PC-3000 showed that Head 1 was weak, but was working well enough to image data.
My thought is that the drop likely caused some platter damage when Head 1 came into contact with the platters. The damage would then cause the drive to notice a lot of what it thinks are bad sectors (a combination of the weak head reporting bad sectors and the actual bad sectors from the area that was damaged). This in turn could cause corruption in Module 32.
Cloning the bad drive to a good drive
The next step in the recovery was to start the imaging process. Imaging a drive is cloning the bad drive onto a good drive so you can work with a known good drive during the software recovery phase of the recovery process. I set the imaging to a quick pass to find where the damage was so I could skip that area while I recovered the rest of the drive.
The imaging process took a lot of passes to get every sector possible from the drive. I ended up with about 99.9% of the sectors on the drive being recovered. Once I was satisfied that I had gotten back every sector possible, I moved on to the process of recovering the data from the sectors.
Western Digital Data Recovery Service
The software recovery stage went really smoothly. I was able to recover everything I needed to have full folder structure and file names. I was able to test the important documents and photos and they were working great!
The client was pleased to have all their important data back and was especially pleased that it fell under my Standard pricing tier. The Standard pricing tier is my lowest recovery tier and saved them thousands over what other shops likely would have quoted for this same recovery.
If you have a Western Digital drive you need data recovered from, or any drive for that matter, I am here to help! You can start the process by filling out my quick recovery form, or you can start by requesting a quote with my easy quote form. Please contact me if you have any questions.
Thanks for reading!
Drive info: Western Digital 250GB Scorpio Black MDL: WD2500BEKT-75A25T0, DATE: 04 DEC 2010, DCX: LA082B058
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