”Many thanks for returning my data after my Samsung external drive suddenly stopped working. Thoroughly professional job.”
Tommy Morgan, Wrexham
A Samsung external USB drive enclosure arrived at our laboratory in Oxford from Wrexham, containing a 1TB hard disk drive. In common with many of these drives, when our hardware data recovery engineers examined the drive they found that it had become seized as a result of the read/write heads settling onto the platter surface. When some USB drive are incorrectly disconnected or powered off while still accessing the disk, the read/write heads sometimes fail to return to their safe zone.
Our hardware data recovery specialists dismantled the drive in order to clean the platters before reassembling it using donor read/write heads, as the previous ones had been destroyed. This allowed our data recovery engineers to secure a sector-by-sector image of the drive, encountering a couple of dozen unreadable bad sectors during the process.
Our data recovery speciailists examined the image secured from the drive revealing it to contain a single 1TB NTFS data volume containing approximately 630GB of files consisting mainly of photos and videos along with some office documents. A scan revealed that the bad sectors encountered during the imaging process had affected some of the file system metadata structures unnecessary for data recovery and a couple of the photos. The recovered data was returned to the customer on a new external USB drive.