Data Recovery Specialists
One of the best data recovery and data backups company’s around. Partner with Big Box Computers & simplify all your backup and or desktop data recovery and or laptop data recovery needs.
We Perform Data Recovery of Hard Drives from a Wide Range of Media Including:
- Servers (Single and RAID)
- SANs, NASs, SNAP Servers
- Portable Hard Drive (External Hard Drives)
- Removable Hard Drives
- Desktop PC / iMac – 3.5 inch HDD / SSD
- Laptop PC / Mac – 2.5 inch HDD / SSD
- Other
- Data Recovery
- Hard Drive HDD Repairs
- RAID Disks Repair
- Recover Deleted Files / Undelete Files
- Non booting Windows
- Corrupted data due to virus or physical damage
- USB drives, Flash memory cards, SD Cards, Micro SD
- Notebooks, Servers, Desktops, External or Other
- Camcorders HDV / HD / HDD
The most common data recovery scenario involves an operating system failure, malfunction of a storage device, accidental damage or deletion, etc. (typically, on a single-drive, single-partition, single-OS system), in which case the goal is simply to copy all wanted files to another drive. This can be easily accomplished using a Live CD, many of which provide a means to mount the system drive and backup drives or removable media, and to move the files from the system drive to the backup media with a file manager or optical disc authoring software. Such cases can often be mitigated by disk partitioning and consistently storing valuable data files (or copies of them) on a different partition from the replaceable OS system files.
Another scenario involves a drive-level failure, such as a compromised file system or drive partition, or a hard disk drive failure. In any of these cases, the data cannot be easily read. Depending on the situation, solutions involve repairing the file system, partition table or master boot record, or drive recovery techniques ranging from software-based recovery of corrupted data, hardware- and software-based recovery of damaged service areas (also known as the hard disk drive’s “firmware”), to hardware replacement on a physically damaged drive. If a drive recovery is necessary, the drive itself has typically failed permanently, and the focus is rather on a one-time recovery, salvaging whatever data can be read.
In a third scenario, files have been “deleted” from a storage medium. Typically, the contents of deleted files are not removed immediately from the drive; instead, references to them in the directory structure are removed, and the space they occupy is made available for later overwriting. For the end users, deleted files are not discoverable through a standard file manager, but that data still technically exists on the drive. In the meantime, the original file contents remain, often in a number of disconnected fragments, and may be recoverable.
Four phases of data recovery
Usually, there are four phases when it comes to successful data recovery, though that can vary depending on the type of data corruption and recovery required.
Phase 1: Repair the hard disk drive
Repair the hard disk drive so it is running in some form, or at least in a state suitable for reading the data from it. For example, if heads are bad they need to be changed; if the PCB is faulty then it needs to be fixed or replaced; if the spindle motor is bad the platters and heads should be moved to a new drive.
Phase 2: Image the drive to a new drive or a disk image file
When a hard disk drive fails, the importance of getting the data off the drive is the top priority. The longer a faulty drive is used, the more likely further data loss is to occur. Creating an image of the drive will ensure that there is a secondary copy of the data on another device, on which it is safe to perform testing and recovery procedures without harming the source.
Phase 3: Logical recovery of files, partition, MBR and MFT
After the drive has been cloned to a new drive, it is suitable to attempt the retrieval of lost data. If the drive has failed logically, there are a number of reasons for that. Using the clone it may be possible to repair the partition table, MBR and MFT in order to read the file system’s data structure and retrieve stored data.
Phase 4: Repair damaged files that were retrieved
Data damage can be caused when, for example, a file is written to a sector on the drive that has been damaged. This is the most common cause in a failing drive, meaning that data needs to be reconstructed to become readable. Corrupted documents can be recovered by several software methods or by manually reconstructing the document using a hex editor.
Computer data recovery can be a tricky business, usually requiring the help of hard drive data recovery experts. But in all hard drive recovery situations, experts advise users remain calm and not act in a way that will make matters worse.
Compared with data recovery software, data recovery hardware connects or controls directly to the patient storage medias and makes much more sense to offer better data recovery solutions to fix the failures based on the failure type.
Bad sectors
There are two types of bad sectors — often divided into “physical” and “logical” bad sectors or “hard” and “soft” bad sectors.
When the drive has physical (hard) bad sectors, software cannot effectively offer soft reset, hard reset, power reset, error handling, read algorithm auto exchange, skip read sectors, etc., if users connect such kind of patient drives to PC, the PC would hang or not detected at all, sometime, Blue Screen of Death occurs too.
Firmware failures
When the drive has firmware failures, users need to read firmware modules or tracks, need to find out which ones are bad and then try to regenerate the modules, edit the modules or get the donor modules in other methods. This is what software cannot do. When the drive has weak heads, user need to use selective head image or edit head map in RAM to work with good heads first and then bad heads, software cannot transfer these special commands at all.
Dead PCB
This is the (often green) circuit board attached to the bottom of your drive. It houses the main Controller (computing) (the equivalent of your computer’s CPU) along with many other electronic controllers. This is the interface that turns your 0’s and 1’s from the platter into usable data that your computer can understand.
When the drive has dead PCB (Printed circuit board), users need to swap with donor PCB and then try to put one donor chip and write by chip reader with matching ROM (Read-only memory) content and get the dead drive spinning up normally and then access to the drive for further repairing.
When the drive has physical head damage, users need to open the drive in cleanroom environment and find donor heads or other donor components to swap so that make the drive alive again.
So it’s important for users to learn to set up professional data recovery labs, data recovery hardware is the No.1 choice and is a must. Of course, data recovery software is used too. Because file extraction hardware, disk images, chip readers have both combined.
Accidentally Deletion
Accidentally click ‘Move to trash’
‘Command + Del’ or ‘Shift+Del’ to delete your files
Empty trash or recycle bin without backup
Format Recovery
Accidentally format your computer disk/volume or SD/Memory card etc.
File loss due to hard drive crash, system crash or windows re-installation
‘Media/Drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?’
Format due to virus infection or computer initialization
Raw partition, disk displays as RAW or ‘Media/Drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?
Partition Recovery
Accidentally deleting a partition
Partition loss due to re-partition, boot manager, improper clone, system restore, disk accident etc.
Other Reasons
Other scenarios including device initialization, virus attack, Memory/SD card ‘Access Denied’ or can’t be read, media card error, factory setting of device without backup etc.
Unexpected power-off, software crash, turning off storage media during writing process, improperly pulling out SD card.
Overwritten data
After data has been physically overwritten on a hard disk drive, it is generally assumed that the previous data are no longer possible to recover. In 1996, Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist, presented a paper that suggested overwritten data could be recovered through the use of magnetic force microscope.[7] In 2001, he presented another paper on a similar topic. To guard against this type of data recovery, Gutmann and Colin Plumb designed a method of irreversibly scrubbing data, known as the Gutmann method and used by several disk-scrubbing software packages.
Substantial criticism has followed, primarily dealing with the lack of any concrete examples of significant amounts of overwritten data being recovered.[9] Although Gutmann’s theory may be correct, there is no practical evidence that overwritten data can be recovered, while research has shown to support that overwritten data cannot be recovered.[specify]
Solid-state drives (SSD) overwrite data differently from hard disk drives (HDD) which makes at least some of their data easier to recover. Most SSDs use flash memory to store data in pages and blocks, referenced by logical block addresses (LBA) which are managed by the flash translation layer (FTL). When the FTL modifies a sector it writes the new data to another location and updates the map so the new data appear at the target LBA. This leaves the pre-modification data in place, with possibly many generations, and recoverable by data recovery software.
Locations we do Data Recovery
- Data Recovery Aspendale 3195
- Data Recovery Aspendale Gardens 3195
- Data Recovery Balaclava 3183
- Data Recovery Baxter 3911
- Data Recovery Beaumaris 3193
- Data Recovery Berwick
- Data Recovery Braeside 3195
- Data Recovery Bonbeach 3196
- Data Recovery Carrum 3197
- Data Recovery Chelsea 3196
- Data Recovery Chelsea Heights 3196
- Data Recovery Cheltenham 3192
- Data Recovery Clarinda 3169
- Data Recovery Clayton South 3169
- Data Recovery Cranbourne 3977
- Data Recovery Dandenong 3175
- Data Recovery Dingley Village 3172
- Data Recovery Edithvale 3196
- Data Recovery Edithvale 3196
- Data Recovery Endeavour Hills 3802
- Data Recovery Frankston 3199
- Data Recovery Frankston North 3200
- Data Recovery Frankston South 3199
- Data Recovery Hampton Park 3976
- Data Recovery Heatherton 3202
- Data Recovery Highett 3190
- Data Recovery Hallam 3803
- Data Recovery Langwarrin 3910
- Data Recovery Lyndhurst 3975
- Data Recovery Mentone 3194
- Data Recovery Moorabbin 3189
- Data Recovery Moorabbin Airport 3194
- Data Recovery Mordialloc 3195
- Data Recovery Mt Eliza 3930
- Data Recovery Mt Martha 3934
- Data Recovery Narre Warren 3805
- Data Recovery Narre Warren East 3804
- Data Recovery Narre Warren North 3804
- Data Recovery Narren Warren South 3805
- Data Recovery Noble Park 3174
- Data Recovery Oakleigh South 3167
- Data Recovery Parkdale 3195
- Data Recovery Patterson Lakes 3197
- Data Recovery Sandhurst 3977
- Data Recovery Seaford 3198
- Data Recovery Springvale 3171
- Data Recovery Skye 3977
- Data Recovery Waterways 3195
- Data Recovery Westfield Shopping Centre
- Data Recovery
*Prices are subject to change without notice. For current prices, please call for a quote.
Call (03) 9016-0133 for a repair consultation, or feel free to visit our shop front.
Big Box Computers | Data Recovery fpr PC or Apple Mac Book Laptop | iMac Desktop – Melbourne – Shop #5, 536 Nepean Hwy, Bonbeach VIC 3196, Australia