“Many thanks for recovering the data from my laptop after it started making horrible scrapping and clicking noises.”
Sally Malden, Kew
A 500GB Western Digital laptop hard disk drive arrived from Kew at our data recovery office in Fleet Street, London. Our hardware data recovery specialists examined the drive finding that the read/write heads had crashed into the surface of the drive. A further examination determined that the drive motor spindle had suffered a failure, which appears to have caused the disk platters to fluctuate, resulting the read/write heads impacting with the platter surfaces. This failure was most likely caused by the disk drive being operated consistently at a high temperature for an extended period of time.
Our hardware data recovery engineers were able to overcome the problem using donor parts. This allowed our data recovery specialists to secure a sector-by-sector image of the drive. Approximately a twenty thousand unreadable bad sectors were encountered during the imaging process.
Our software data recovery engineers examined the drive image, revealing it to contain a single 500GB NTFS partition. This NTFS volume was analysed revealing it to contain approximately 380GB of data files, consisting of the operating system and program files, mp3s, videos, photos and a large assortment of office documents. When the recovered data files were scanned, the unreadable bad sectors were found to have mostly affected the operating system and program files, with only about two dozen mp3s, photos and office documents damaged. Our data recovery engineers extracted the recoverable files which were written to a brand new external USB hard disk drive for return to the customer.
