Case Study for a Seagate ST1000LM035 Rosewood
A recent Seagate 1tb slim 2.5 inch hard drive came into our data recovery labs for data retrieval, the client had lost pictures, which were of a sentimental nature and went back many years.
The client had reported that the disk was longer accessible via the operatizing system and could not be seen by the computer at all, our engineers enquired if it was making a clicking or unusual noise, to which the client said it did not.
The engineer taking the call immediately thought that this hard drive may have been suffering from a firmware fault, the firmware is like the operating system of the hard drive, it contains all geometry and track details, the P and G list, these hold the LBA or sector mapping data and contain spare sector pooling for bad sectors when they appear, the translator and many other calibrations such as head mapping and sometimes the fly height of the read / write heads, one further complication the firmware which is not available to end users and requires techno commands to access this area is locked and signed digitally.
Upon receiving the hard drive in our lab, the faulty disk was connected to our diagnostic equipment, which identified that the disk was spinning and coming ready, had no unusual noises or clicking but no surface access could be made at all.
A process of patching the Rom on the PCB to gain access to the locked forward allowed a diagnoses that confirmed certain sys files had issues.
After expert intervention by our engineers that user data was restored, a full clone of the data was created and the file system was scanned and a folder and file listing was created and sent to the client to confirm all data was present and correct.
Occasionally clients open there hard drives to just have a look, this is not something that you should even consider, the Rosewood family of hard drives are very delicate and the top part of the disk enclosure is covered in a thin tape to stop contaminates from entering the disk enclosure.
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