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My Hard Drive Died #11 – More Questions Answered
Hosted by Steve Cherubino and Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com.
Email question from Jerry:
Q: A remapping function in MHDD won’t kill your drive; you may lose your data but it won’t kill your drive. True or false?
A: Remapping is not supposed to lose your data, it reads the data from the drive and it will relocate it. Similar to what SpinRite does.
If the reading time takes longer than expected (i.e. 350ms) then it will mark the sector as bad.
Email question from Jorge:
Q: I have an old disk from a customer, I’m trying to extract data from it but every time I connect the drive via a USB connector I get prompted with this message: “You need to format the disk before you can use”. I already checked the jumper settings, even tried setting up the drive as a slave on an old computer and still no luck. Yes I tried Ultimate Boot CD and Knoppix and “nada”.
A: The USB connector is the biggest problem, you do not get true feedback using a USB connector; it’s not the native way to talk to the drive, USB does not respond to all the ATA commands. You need to find a good motherboard that will support the correct ATA specs for the drive, you will have a better chance to access data on this drive. A good tool to use for this would be R-Studio which is an all-in-one tool that supports: Mac, Windows, Linux, Dynamic Raid, etc. The cost for this tool runs for around US$79.00.
Email question from Mad Marv:
Q: How can I recover data from a RAID5 array if I only have the hard drives and not the server they were installed in. I do not have the raid controller or motherboard; I think these disks came from a Windows Server 2003. I’m fairly sure the RAID itself is undamaged and was working when the drives were removed from the server.
A: This is a very long topic; a video is available for this particular topic which I call “The mystery box”. The best we can hope for is that the drives were properly numbered when they were removed from the server but this is never the case. Again, using R-Studio you could rebuild your drives. Take all the drives and connect them via USB controllers to your windows machine and then create a fake or virtual array.
Recover your PORN from your RAID Array! (PDF 3.5MB)
YouTube Video – Defcon17 Hard Drive RAID Recovery
Scot’s YouTube channel: SuperFlyFlippingA
Email question from Oliver:
Q: I’m an ICT service manager in Hastings (UK), we have a problem with students putting the hard drive passwords on our laptops in the BIOS.
These are Western Digital 160GB Scorpio drives, I loaded VICTORIA but it requires the password to unlock the drives.
Is there a way to unlock these drives?
A: The password is done in firmware; using VICTORIA or MHDD requires you to know the password.
There are 2 types of passwords: Master Password and User Password. The laptop manufacturer will usually set the Master password.
Master Password for Western Digital drives is:
WDCWDCWDCWDCWDC WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD
PC3000 is the premier data recovery tool accessing hard disk drives at a firmware level
HDD Unlock is a user-friendly application which allows you to easily remove HDD password.
IDE and SATA hard disk drives are supported. Both User and Master password can be removed
Email question from Stevo:
Q: I need to know if he has a preferred brand of standalone drive to drive unit he recommends. I just purchased a Bytecc T-203 hard drive docking stations. It’s a standalone duplicator.
A: I’m not very impressed with Bytecc, there are other imaging tools that I prefer such as DeepSpar Disk Imager
Email question from Roger:
Q: I want to hear what Scott thinks about CHKDSK /R and if he recommends using it.
A: This is a dangerous tool, it is a very dumb piece of software; in some cases it simply eats your records/files.
Next Data Recovery Classes
San Diego May 10th – 14th
San Francisco June 14th -18th
Atlanta July 12th-16th
Dallas October 11th – 15th
Washington DC December 6th – 10th
Notes by Jorge Hernandez of 123ComputerRepair.com
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Hosted by Steve Cherubino and Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com.
Email question from Jerry:
Q: A remapping function in MHDD won’t kill your drive; you may lose your data but it won’t kill your drive. True or false?
A: Remapping is not supposed to lose your data, it reads the data from the drive and it will relocate it. Similar to what SpinRite does.
If the reading time takes longer than expected (i.e. 350ms) then it will mark the sector as bad.
Email question from Jorge:
Q: I have an old disk from a customer, I’m trying to extract data from it but every time I connect the drive via a USB connector I get prompted with this message: “You need to format the disk before you can use”. I already checked the jumper settings, even tried setting up the drive as a slave on an old computer and still no luck. Yes I tried Ultimate Boot CD and Knoppix and “nada”.
A: The USB connector is the biggest problem, you do not get true feedback using a USB connector; it’s not the native way to talk to the drive, USB does not respond to all the ATA commands. You need to find a good motherboard that will support the correct ATA specs for the drive, you will have a better chance to access data on this drive. A good tool to use for this would be R-Studio which is an all-in-one tool that supports: Mac, Windows, Linux, Dynamic Raid, etc. The cost for this tool runs for around US$79.00.
Email question from Mad Marv:
Q: How can I recover data from a RAID5 array if I only have the hard drives and not the server they were installed in. I do not have the raid controller or motherboard; I think these disks came from a Windows Server 2003. I’m fairly sure the RAID itself is undamaged and was working when the drives were removed from the server.
A: This is a very long topic; a video is available for this particular topic which I call “The mystery box”. The best we can hope for is that the drives were properly numbered when they were removed from the server but this is never the case. Again, using R-Studio you could rebuild your drives. Take all the drives and connect them via USB controllers to your windows machine and then create a fake or virtual array.
Recover your PORN from your RAID Array! (PDF 3.5MB)
YouTube Video – Defcon17 Hard Drive RAID Recovery
Scot’s YouTube channel: SuperFlyFlippingA
Email question from Oliver:
Q: I’m an ICT service manager in Hastings (UK), we have a problem with students putting the hard drive passwords on our laptops in the BIOS.
These are Western Digital 160GB Scorpio drives, I loaded VICTORIA but it requires the password to unlock the drives.
Is there a way to unlock these drives?
A: The password is done in firmware; using VICTORIA or MHDD requires you to know the password.
There are 2 types of passwords: Master Password and User Password. The laptop manufacturer will usually set the Master password.
Master Password for Western Digital drives is:
WDCWDCWDCWDCWDC WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD
PC3000 is the premier data recovery tool accessing hard disk drives at a firmware level
HDD Unlock is a user-friendly application which allows you to easily remove HDD password.
IDE and SATA hard disk drives are supported. Both User and Master password can be removed
Email question from Stevo:
Q: I need to know if he has a preferred brand of standalone drive to drive unit he recommends. I just purchased a Bytecc T-203 hard drive docking stations. It’s a standalone duplicator.
A: I’m not very impressed with Bytecc, there are other imaging tools that I prefer such as DeepSpar Disk Imager
Email question from Roger:
Q: I want to hear what Scott thinks about CHKDSK /R and if he recommends using it.
A: This is a dangerous tool, it is a very dumb piece of software; in some cases it simply eats your records/files.
Next Data Recovery Classes
San Diego May 10th – 14th
San Francisco June 14th -18th
Atlanta July 12th-16th
Dallas October 11th – 15th
Washington DC December 6th – 10th
Notes by Jorge Hernandez of 123ComputerRepair.com