West Coast Data Recovery

02/08/2020

Showing the value of a simple tool like a green flashlight, and how it can help identify signs of damage on HDD platters. Did you know that the human eye is most sensitive to the green spectrum!?

09/12/2019

Sometimes the read / write heads can become VERY stuck to the disk surfaces due to a vacuum being created between the two super flat surfaces.
Because the platters cannot safely be removed from the drive without introducing alignment issues, a method had to be devised to retrieve these pieces.
Thin, small diameter fishing wire (polymer based) works wonders for this task. It is soft enough to avoid damage to the disk surfaces, and is small enough to get a hold of the tiny pieces.

After the pieces are removed, the disks are cleaned as well as possible, and new read / write heads are installed.

The drive is reading now!

08/23/2019

The USB connector on this flash drive had been damaged and ripped up some of the circuit with it. Fortunately I was able to wire the connector back on, jumping the damaged area and re-completing the circuit to bring this drive back to life!

06/10/2019

Many newer HDDs really benefit (or require) custom cut "combs" that are measured to exact specifications in order to successfully complete a headstack replacement.

Here's a photo of a set in action!

04/19/2019

This SD card had a rough day with TSA, and one of the corners of the memory chips had been pulled up, damaging the board as well.

The only option was a chip - off recovery.

04/11/2019

This HDD looks to have been damaged by an impact of some kind, possibly a drop or being knocked over. The ramp is cracked in a way that I would guess the heads themselves were actually parked at the time of the impact, but may have swept onto the platters afterwards when the system was powered up again.

04/08/2019

Replacing the head-stack of a Toshiba 1TB laptop Hard Drive

Performing a heads transplant on a Toshiba 1TB 2.5 inch laptop HDD. www.westcoastdatarecovery.com

02/06/2019

Most portable external drives on the market today have been designed with the USB connection directly on to the circuit board. In the past a separate board inside the plastic enclosures provided the conversion to USB from the hard drives native connection SATA.

These drives lock down the commands available through USB, but also in addition the newest models also have locked firmware. On top of that, these drives encrypt all of the data written through the USB connection to the drive. So once we work through SATA we have to obtain the decryption key from this locked firmware to properly extract the data from these drives.

Below are some photos of my process of wiring a SATA connection into one of these drives after it had already had it's internal components (head-stack) replaced as well.

It is now reading sectors and the data will be recovered!

12/13/2018

Breaking in the clean bench with a headstack replacement on a Toshiba laptop hard drive.