Cases recovered in Brussels

The working drive of a professional photographer from the Hasselt area, a 4 TB LaCie Rugged USB-C, fell to the floor. It held her entire shoot archive: RAW files and video rushes from client projects, with no backup copy. After the fall, no access at all. Inside the enclosure was a Seagate ST4000LM024 with a locked service area: the drive could no longer initialise. One decisive detail: nobody tried to restart it. The client wrote to us that same Sunday and dropped the drive off in the evening.

Before any power was applied, the drive was opened in the cleanroom: the head stack was removed and inspected under the microscope to confirm that no head was contaminated or damaged by the fall. The heads were clean, so they were refitted, and only then was the drive started, with no risk of scoring the platters. That left the locked service area. The ROM chip was desoldered from the PCB, read on a programmer, unlocked on PC-3000, rewritten and soldered back. A full backup of the service area followed, then the configuration modules (the drive's « passport », which holds its operating parameters) were edited to stop the drive from running its self-repair routines, which are destructive in this condition. On Data Extractor, the head map showed which heads still responded: the accessible zones were imaged first. The drive was then stopped, the head stack replaced with a compatible donor set, and imaging resumed to extract the remainder.

An HP gaming laptop that no longer booted, brought in by a client from Leuven, and inside it a 1 TB Seagate FireCuda ST1000LX015: a hybrid drive, fitted in machines like this to speed up load times, that is a conventional hard drive with a flash memory chip soldered onto its board. The drive would not spin at all. It still reported its model and serial number correctly, a sign that the fault was not mechanical. On this model the NAND chip carries part of the firmware, so when it fails the drive can no longer initialise, even with untouched platters. On it were the client's photos and personal documents, with no full backup.

On power-up the drive does not spin up but comes to DRD+DSC and reports its passport correctly, while the terminal shows the error LED:0x000000BD FAddr:0x000059D8, the signature of the failing NAND on this series. Because the patient's board was dead, it could not be used to unlock the drive. The patient ROM was first read through the terminal, then a donor board was sourced on three strict criteria: same model, same firmware version, same PCB number. The patient ROM was written to that donor board, the board was fitted to the client's drive, and unlocking was done through the terminal, with the NAND reinitialised using the /OI1 command. Before any reading, the background processes were switched off: automatic reallocation on read and on write, deferred defect hiding, idle activity. The drive was then imaged sector by sector on PC-3000 Data Extractor.

An 8 TB LaCie d2 Professional external enclosure with a USB-C connection was no longer recognized by the computer after being dropped, and a slight abnormal noise was coming from the drive. The LaCie d2 Professional houses an 8 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro ST8000NT001 hard drive, which no longer allowed access to its data via the USB port. The customer had dropped the device. No backup was available.

The diagnosis required removing the Seagate hard drive from its LaCie enclosure. On the printed circuit board (PCB), the ROM memory was spread across two separate chips: these were read using a programmer, then imported into the PC-3000 system and reconstructed into a single ROM image. Using the PC-3000 Portable Pro, the drive was then configured for head-by-head reading, with each read head processed separately to preserve data integrity.

A 1 TB Maxtor M3 Portable external hard drive (Seagate ST1000LM035-1RK172) had inaccessible data, even though the enclosure appeared to be in perfect condition. The customer, based in Luxembourg, could hear the drive running but was no longer able to open his files. Another lab had already attempted data recovery, without success. The data at stake was limited but precious: family photos that existed only on this drive, with no backup.

The diagnosis ruled out a simple logic issue and revealed a weak read head as well as a locked ROM module, which was preventing the disk from functioning. The ROM was first unlocked on a PC-3000 workstation to restore access. A head map was then created in Data Extractor, followed by a map of the data sectors that were actually occupied. Only the data useful to the customer—the family photos—were imaged in read-only mode, taking care to protect the fragile read head to maximize readability.

An HP ProLiant ML350 G6 server with a RAID 1 of two SAS drives became inaccessible after a reboot. The first drive had failed weeks earlier without any alert, and the second eventually gave out, blocking access to a transport company's critical data.

We performed a sector-by-sector copy of each drive to preserve the originals. By comparing the images, we identified the most up-to-date drive and then extracted all the data.

A 128 GB Kingston DataTraveler USB drive contained an old Outlook PST archive that the user had accidentally deleted. This file contained several years’ worth of work emails and did not exist anywhere else: no backup copy had been kept. The flash drive remained fully functional and was recognized by the system, but the archive was no longer visible. The challenge was to recover a single, large PST file without writing anything to the drive.

A complete image of the drive was first created on a server using Data Extractor in read-only mode, in order to work on a copy and preserve the original. By analyzing the used and free space, we were able to locate and reconstruct the deleted, slightly damaged PST file. Since the raw data was intact, the repair was performed at the logical level: the ScanPST utility built into Microsoft Outlook corrected minor inconsistencies in the file’s structure.

A 5TB Seagate hard drive was making an abnormal noise, indicating a head crash. The company contacted us urgently on a Saturday, without an appointment.

Head stack replacement in a cleanroom, followed by reading and extracting the data to a healthy drive. The intervention was carried out the same day, with no extra charge for the weekend.

An architect from Venice brought us a SanDisk Extreme SSD whose partition had become inaccessible. An initial attempt at recovery using TestDisk had made the situation worse: the tool had written corrupted data to the first partition, making it difficult to access the original files.

Before performing any operations, we created a bit-by-bit (sector-by-sector) copy of the entire disk so that we could work exclusively on the image and preserve the original media. Analyzing this image allowed us to locate the actual starting point of the HFS+ partition and reconstruct its structure.

The external hard drive was no longer recognized by the computer and emitted faint clicking sounds.

We converted the USB interface to SATA and unlocked the ROM using PC-3000. A head map was created to extract data first via the healthy heads, then via the failing head.

RAID 5: First disk failure. When rebuilding after its replacement, a second disk failed, resulting in a total crash and the loss of the volume.

Cloned all disks and identified the configuration. A virtual array was assembled using PC-3000 RAID Edition, restoring bad sectors from parity data.

A 2 TB Seagate ST2000LM007 that started clicking and was no longer detected. Abnormal noise on power-up, urgent recovery.

Opened in an ISO 5 cleanroom, head stack replaced with a compatible donor set, then platters imaged and data extracted on a PC-3000 bench.

256GB iPhone 12 Pro with corrosion-damaged motherboard, broken screen, phone wouldn't turn on. Photos and personal data to be recovered.

Corrosion cleaning, motherboard repair (micro-soldering) and screen replacement, then data extraction from the phone.