WD My Cloud Cannot Login In the last few days, we’ve heard that hard drive manufacturer Western Digital have suffered a major outage with their web services. Unfortunately due to the way these NAS drives use a web service to login, it means when the web service is down, you cannot login to your own device. Nobody knows if WD can bring the service back online at some point, or how long that could take. In the meantime, we’ve now recovered a few of these drives, so if you need access to your data, get in touch. Contact Us Now…For a fast reply from a real person. Affected Models: G1C BGEJRA 3718 ..read more

In the last few years, soldered storage has gone from a strange Apple quirk, to a standard way of manufacturing laptops. There was outrage when apple first started soldering RAM and storage, but you’ll now find soldered SSDs in laptops from Microsoft, HP, Dell, and any other manufacturer you can think of. That’s not to mention all the millions of phones & tablets with soldered storage. Benefits From a manufacturing point of view, soldering the SSDs makes sense. Fewer “bulky” connectors on the motherboard can lead to thinner and lighter computers. Because a 5mm thick laptop is just not thi ..read more

We recently completed an extremely difficult recovery from a fire damaged hard drive. The drive was stolen from an Annke CCTV system during a burglary and then set on fire. This is what we received: Photo of a burnt Seagate Hard Drive Despite looking like it had fallen from space, we could recognise that it was a Seagate drive. Most of the label was burnt off. Where to start with the recovery It’s easy to get overwhelmed by a case like this, but it’s important to break the problem down into manageable chunks. First we needed to extract the unique information from the circuit board (PCB). The b ..read more

The last time we posted about these drives was 2015, and we’re seeing another surge of these drives failing again. In the past week alone, we’ve seen two separate pairs of RAID mirrors (four drives total), an iMac Fusion Drive, a standalone iMac drive and an external Seagate backup drive from a PC. All failed with no known impact, and all unrecoverable due to media damage. What is media damage? In a hard drive, the discs are the media, and damage is caused by impact from the heads or another internal part. Usually this takes a certain amount of force and will be the result of the drive being d ..read more

The saga of fake eBay and Amazon products continues. This latest instalment was supposedly a 1TB USB External Hard drive that had failed. The client didn’t suspect anything unusual about the drive until it failed, so sent it to us for diagnosis. When we removed the drive from the generic external case, we found a drive with an extra plain label over the usual manufacturers label. This is not unheard of, but is unusual, and made us a bit suspicious. We peeled back the plain label, and underneath was a 120GB hard drive, that looks like it was pulled from an old HP laptop. FakeRealFakeRealThe Rog ..read more

Our data recovery process almost always begins with a copy process. Otherwise known as cloning or imaging, we attempt to copy every data block from the failed disk to another disk. With a normal disk, we can record how long it takes to copy a block, then multiply by the total number of blocks to calculate how long the process will take. Cloning a Normal Disk With a faulty disk, this is not possible. A faulty disk will often read different blocks at different speeds depending on how bad the problem is. Until we read the block, there’s no way to know how long it will take. This is illustrated in ..read more

Fake Capacity SD Card I assume this Kimsnot card is meant to be a fake Kingston SD card, although it appears to steal more of the visual design from a SanDisk Extreme card. This SD card was sadly used to photograph a wedding, and unsurprisingly to us, only the first 16GB of photographs are readable. The rest are lost forever, because the other 112GB just doesn’t exist. The card reports 128GB of useable space, but anything above 16GB gets written into thin air. You don’t even get an error until you try to read back the files later. We’ve seen all sorts of fake capacity storage, and despite clea ..read more

We don’t often get much call to recover CDs anymore, but this recent case was interesting. We received a set of five CDRs labelled image library backup 2002. The user had no idea what software created them, and just a vague memory that they may have been burned from a Windows 98 PC. Step 1… Read the discs As usual, our first task is to read all the discs, and in this case save them to image files (ISO / Bin Files) for scanning later. Due to their age (19 years!), I expected this to be the hard part, but all the discs read well. Good work pink Verbatim DataLifePlus®! In fact there were just six ..read more

We’ve started to use an open source file listing tool, to make it easier to check though the recovered data before we send it to you. We’ll send you a zipped html file, with your job number as the filename. Something like “211111-File-List.zip“. Inside is a similarly named file ending “.html” which is a web page and can be opened by a web browser on a computer. You should see your folders listed on the left, and can click to navigate though the subfolders. A picture paints a thousand words, so see the example below. FAQ Why can’t I open the files? This is just a visual list of the files, it do ..read more

If you’ve been having computer problems, you may have been asked for your Bitlocker key. In most cases you won’t be able to access your files without this key. Even if you know your login password! Bitlocker should never be enabled without a backup of the key, but there are cases when that can happen by mistake. Fortunately the keys are usually saved into your Microsoft account, or other corporate network account. Where to look? For a list of ways to find your Bitlocker keys, see the official guidance by Microsoft. In particular, you should login to: Your own, or any other Microsoft accounts ..read more