We just recently completed a data recovery project from a Western Digital WD20EARX-22PASB0 hard drive that was reported to us as having a knocking noise. During our assessment, we did not encounter any unusual noises and found that the drive powered on and detected absolutely fine on our recovery systems and just would not allow access to any of the sectors holding user accessible data.
Strangely enough, we were able to fully read and write to the firmware modules that are also stored on the drive’s platters in special service tracks, using very expensive and specialized data recovery equipment. This behavior suggested to us that the drive is unable to load the translator modules responsible for providing access to the sectors holding the user accessible data.
We tried every trick in the book to find and fix any and all firmware issues, but still could not access a single sector. As a result, our team was left with the conclusion that although the heads were working fine within the service tracks, they were just too weak to fully read and load the translator, making data accessibility impossible without replacing the heads.
After changing the heads, the drive identified perfectly, just as it had before. The only difference being that we could now read the sectors holding the user data. From here we read both the MFT and Bitmap files without any read errors and then targeted the user data by bitmap, allowing us to image only the sectors holding actual user data which we wanted to recover.
The end result; we recovered all of the client’s files, 99.99% of which had absolutely no bad sectors.
If you or anyone you know is having problem recovering data from a Western Digital hard drive and would like your data recovered safely, quickly and at an affordable price, contact the team at Recovery Force.
Call us toll free at 866-750-3169