“Most grateful for the return of my files are I dropped my external disk on the floor. It then would not mount and made a slightly strange noise. A friend told me to send it for data recovery as the only solution. Many thanks.”
Warren Wilson, Ipswich
A Samsung external hard disk enclosure arrived at our laboratory in Oxford from Ipswich. It was found to a contain 1TB hard disk drive, which was found to have a seized motor spindle assembly, which had caused the drive to be unable to spin up. Our data recovery hardware specialists were able to rebuild the drive using donor parts, enabling them to secure a sector-by-sector image of the drive. During the imaging process approximately 30 unreadable bad sectors were encountered.
Luckily when the drive was dropping it was not plugged, which allowed the read/write heads to stay safe and not impact with the surface of the platter. By the drive being unable to spin up when plugged into the computer, it avoided any additional damage occurring. All unreadable bad sectors encountered during the imaging process were most likely the result of normal wear and tear on the drive, with bad sectors accumulating over time, which eventually becoming apparent to the operating system once the spare area of the drive becomes full.
The image of the drive was examined by our data recovery specialists, revealing it to contain a single 1TB NTFS data partition. An analysis of the volume revealed it to contain approximately 390GB of files consisting of assorted office documents, accounts data, music and video files and a large number of photos. A scan of the file contents for bad sectors revealed damage had occurred to a couple of photo and a Powerpoint presentation, but the most essentials files required by the customer were undamaged.
