A Mother's Plea to Find a Local Data Recovery Lab

A Mother’s plea to find a local data recovery laboratory

A Local Data Recovery Story

At the end of another summer on an unusually humid day, the phone rang. A woman on the other side of the line pleaded like a mother with an ill child.., “I need your help!”. Sensing the emotion in her voice, I calmly replied “Tell me what happened?”

“All of our wedding videos were copied on this new external hard drive with no other backups, and we can’t access it any longer! We’ve taken it to several different companies that advertise data recovery, and they can’t help! They are insisting that they ship it out somewhere, but we aren’t comfortable with risking further damage or sending it to someone that we cannot meet. We can’t replace these memories and would like to look back at them with our children one day!” she cried out in despair.

I decided to perform a thorough diagnostic to see if there was any hope in recovering these irreplaceable videos. The PCB had been damaged from previous attempts, which was a huge problem with this case, as part of the translator is located on the processor which is on the circuit board. The translator is part of the firmware required to translate the data into a readable format. The only way to recover this drive was to perform a very tricky processor chip transplant.

Did you know that in professional data recovery on modern hard drives the native USB PCB must be converted to SATA to safely proceed with the attempt?

In our case study we prepare the donor circuit board for SATA conversion by removing the capacitors that connect the USB bridge to the SATA controller.

Did you know that part of the translator is located on this chip on the printed circuit board?
One part of the translator is located on the PCB, making it critical for data recovery.
The processor must be examined and prepped for placement
During the preparation process the contacts must be examined for any bridges or shorts.
The donor circuit board must be prepared in the same way
Once the donor is set in place and fluxed, the transplant can proceed using heat from above and below.