Data recovery for LaCie Rugged drop in Hasselt
The problem
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.
Our intervention
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.
Result
The drive was never plugged in again after the fall, and that is what made a complete recovery possible: 100 % of the data read, with no missing sectors. The entire photo and video archive was returned to the photographer, ready the day after drop-off.
Frequently asked question
LaCie Rugged drop: can the data be recovered?
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. The drive was never plugged in again after the fall, and that is what made a complete recovery possible: 100 % of the data read, with no missing sectors. The entire photo and video archive was returned to the photographer, ready the day after drop-off.
Related service: hard drive data recovery