“Many thanks. Excellent service all the way through the process of returning the data from my iMac”
Dean Wendle-Corey, Knightsbridge
We received a 1TB hard disk drive from Knightsbridge at our Fleet Street office in London, which had come from an Apple iMac which had failed to reboot. Our hardware data recovery engineers examined the drive, finding no outward signs of damage. However, during the imaging process to secure a sector-by-sector image of the drive, approximately 10 thousand unreadable bad sectors were encountered, mainly clustered in the early part of the drive.
During the normal lifetime of a drive, the hard disk platters slowly start to encounter bad sectors, which are automatically mapped out by the drive firmware, to spare sectors allocated when the drive is formatted in the factory. This list will eventuall be exhausted, at which point any new bad sector will be presented to the operating system, and will in some circumstances, increase at an alarming speed, as appears to be the case with this drive.
An examination of the image by our data recovery specialists, revealed that the majority of the bad sectors were affecting the non-essential partitions and the Catalog and Extent files of the HFS Plus volume contained on the drive. A scan of the file system found approximately 420GB of recoverable data, including the operating system and application files, plus a large number of photos, images and video files.
An additional 40GB of files were expected, which had not been accessible due to the Catalog and Extent files being damaged. Our data recovery specialists performed a raw data trawl of unused space which found an additional 32GB of photos and video files, the vast majority of which were intact.
