Western Digital My Passport 2 TB USB hard drive with model WD20NMVW-11AV3S0 got damaged due to child pulling the drive accidentally while it was in running and connected to computer, the hard drive was hanging after the pull and could not be accessed or detected in any PC or Mac and hence data & drive was not-readable. The Customer had visited 2 places already for data recovery work, since the drive was physically damaged, the same was not getting initialized or get detected in disk management and the same cannot be scanned with any software or applications. Local computer stores, could only recover data when the drive get properly detected in the computer and can be scanned by using software.
Customer visited our place, within 4 hours of analysis, we have provided the detailed technical report, quote and time for recovery. The drive was continued in our clean room lab for media level component replacement after approval from the client.
We have got 2 working hard drives of the same make, model, Firmware and month of manufacturing which is identical to customer drive i.e. WD20NMVW-11AV3S0, DCX:JA02V9W34, DCM:HBMTJBKB, DATE: OCT 2013, P/N: WDBMWV0020BBL-01, Product of Thailand. The clean room lab work had begun on the drive, the customers hard drive was analyzed for any platter damages or scratches from top platter to ending, the 2 TB WD USB drive contains 4 platters i.e. 8 platter surfaces and 8 heads to read and write data from the magnetic platter surfaces. The drive platter surfaces were safe, but the read write heads were damaged and broken, since customer did not run the drive multiple times after damages or pull.
The hard dive always need to be opened in clean room lab, since other than clean room environment the dust particles accumulation will damage the drive platter surfaces, leading it non-recoverable. The old damaged read-write heads were removed from the customer’s drive, and the new donor hard drive read write heads were replaced with accuracy, the alignment work is done on the disk, wherein the platter and the head distance will be in micro meters during reading and writing modes.
The hard drive was attached to our proprietary hard drive equipment, the firmware readings were taken from Service area and drive got initialized. The drive capacity was restored from 0 MB to 2 TB, the same was taken further with head imaging process, wherein the data was extracted from each platter surfaces and then combined to get information extraction. 3 Level of imaging process is continued with first level of readings were taken from safe platter surfaces and second level from unsafe platter surfaces and third level from non readable sectors with 32 times retrials. The drive was successfully recovered with an accuracy of 98% of data.
The drive was password protected, since it is My Passport USB drive contains WD smartware password protection, the same was decrypted by entering the password. The customer got the entire data with files and folders structure in the drive, was rebuild-ed in last trial, the data was transferred to new drive provided. The complete folder structure was maintained in the drive which was stored from the client.
Drive: My Passport Drive WD20NMVW-11AV3S0, Similarly the drives like 11AV3S1, 11AV3S2, 11AV3S4 drives are handled from our side.
Recovered Data: 98% Accuracy
Time Taken: 14 Days
Customer Feedback: I had images of 23 years of scanned photographs converted from hard copy to soft copy and converted digital videos fro VCR, CD & DVD’s. Thanks for saving my lifetime memories.
