Archive for September, 2016

Questions about Broken Hard Drives

Friday, September 23rd, 2016

In this post we look at three example hard drive problems and give recommendations on identifying the problem and applying the solution to extract the data from the hard drive.

Is Hard Drive Repair Worth It ?
My external hard drive is clicking and not connecting to my macbook so I know it is broken, I do not want a data recovery if possible to avoid it as I’m just wanting the hard drive fixed. I am wondering if you’s fix external hard drives? Thank you.

It’s not really financially worth fixing a hard drive. As hard drives are so cheap to buy, it works out more expensive to fix them than it would be to buy a brand new one. So, if you don’t need to data recovering from your busted hard drive, just buy a new one instead. You’ll get a warranty with it too.

Hard Drive Not Being Found
I have a Seagate 1gb usb hard drive. The light is still lit up when connected to computer, I have brought a new lead just in case it was that, unfortunately it is not being found on any computer. What do I need to do to get the drive to work?

Buying a new lead was a good idea as sometimes that’s all the problem is. Now that you’ve done that and eliminated the lead it’s worth eliminating the external case. Remove the hard drive from the casing and hook it us directly to your computer using a USB to SATA cable. If that works then obviously the case is at fault. If the hard drive is still not being found then the conclusion is that there is a fault on the hard drive. There are some things you can do yourself to try and repaid your hard drive – go and take a look at the http://www.recover-deleted-data.co.uk/ web resource for some good tips of getting the information of off broken hard drives.

Getting the Data off a Packard Bell
I would like quote for the cost of recovering data off a Packard Bell Store & Save hard disk drive Model No H2D2U2 6948820100, particularly the family photos.

You don’t actually say what the failure with your hard drive actually is. Can you provide any more information ? In the above question I mention the Recover Deleted Data web resource – I recommend that you take a look at this site as well, you may be able to find what the problem is with you hard drive and read the advice on getting the data off of it too.

3 Questions about Data

Thursday, September 1st, 2016

Three questions in this post. All about data and it’s loss. The first question concerns a faulty Mac hard drive, the second an overwritten video tape, and finally a question about converting and reading data in an old format.

fixing a hard drive problemQuestion: I have a 1tb WD My Passport for Mac ext hd, last week out of nowhere it stopped showing up on my laptop (I always eject before unplugging). Went to Apple store and they said it might be a b tree failure?! It has lots of photos in it. Can they be recovered?

Answer: The b-tree is the system Mac’s use to store data on storage devices like hard drives. From experience, it’s very unlikely to be a problem with the b-tree, as the hard drive would still show up on your laptop. More likely is a hard drive problem of some kind. Is the hard drive making any different noises at all? You can find a good explanation of hard drive problems, including their symptoms in this hard drive diagnosis walkthru – http://data-recovery-tips.co.uk/hard-drive-diagnosis-walk-thru/.

Question: I have a video tape containing data that was accidentally overwritten. The video was at the beginning of the tape and the duration was around 30 minutes. When I re-wind the tape to the beginning I can see the very start of the overwritten video for a fraction of a second before it cuts to what overwrote it.

Answer: Oh dear, when data is written to video tape it entirely overwrites what was written underneath it. There is no chance of recovering this data. I is gone. I found this useful link explaining how camcorders work here http://www.explainthatstuff.com/camcorders.html.

Question: Do you have the ability to unload and export into either ASCII or EBCDIC, data provided in either AS400 SAV.OBJ or SAV.Lib format contained on a LTO5 tape? if so what is your pricing model and typical lead times and where does the conversion process reside as the data would need to stay within the EU.

Answer: EBCDIC code? Good grief, I haven’t heard that word for about 20 years, when it was an alternative to ASCII, I think ICL mainframes used to use it. LTO5 tapes are a little more recent and I know where to get those converted but I don’t know whether they support AS400 or EBCDIC formats.

More next time! Keep your questions coming!