Recently, we received a case on Western Digital My Passport. According to customer description, this hard drive contains all the company document and sales report, but one day when he inserts the hard disk to the computer, the disk management cannot detect it anymore. So, it is very important to recover it back. Before they engage our data recovery service, this customer already found some of data recovery center, but none of them able to help him recover his data back, so our data recovery center may be his last hope.

When our data recovery specialist first received this hard disk drive. As usual, He does an entire scan of the drives, makes sure there is damage on the drive. After checking, he found out that everything was fine. Next, he decided to plug in the hard disk drive to the computer, he noticed that the computer was not able to detect the disk drive, and when our data specialist touch on the body of the disk drive, he also found out that the disk drive is not vibrating at all, which indicate that motor or read/write head inside the hard disk drive is spoiled, so our data specialist decided to open the passport for further diagnosis.

When come to open the disk drive, our data specialist goes into the clean room, the purpose is to prevent any dust fall onto the disk and cause more problem.

Upon opening the drive, our data specialist found out that the read/write head was stuck on the disk and not moving. This probably due to the drop of hard drive causing the read/write head stuck on the axis, so to solve this data recovery case, our data specialist need to perform a one to one replacement.

After the data surgery, to make sure the hard disk drive was able to detect by the computer, our data specialist plugs in the “new” hard disk drive to our data recovery tool, but our data recovery specialist realise another issue, he found out that he cannot go into the firmware level to do some configuration, and the reason is because this type of hard disk is new type of technology, and our data recovery doesn’t have the family to support it, and we need to write the modules to find out the start address and sector size.

Our data recovery specialist had to do some research and was luckily able to find out the solution, he needs to convert the USB port to the SATA port in order to be able to read the firmware and perform the basic manipulate to it, so he using the welding tool to solder one SATA port to the hard disk and connect the wire to the chip in order for the disk management to detect the hard disk.

After the surgery, our data recovery specialist used the data recovery tool to test the connection, this time the tool was able to detect the hard disk and from there we can clone the data out.

We had achieved another success story, and the customer was glad about our data recovery service, and we also happy that we can help our customer recovery their important data back.