Data Recovery on a 1TB Western Digital WD10TMVW HDD

A Hard Drive Recovery Case Study

Drive: 1TB WD10TMVW

Faults

WD ‘slow response’ firmware problem
Weak head
Use of microjog to source a compatible donor hard drive

Failure Symptoms

We received an enquiry from a customer reporting that his drive was running very slowly, so slow that he’d left the drive overnight attempting to access a folder. When he returned to it in the morning the computer had hung.

Recovery

On many occasions, slow hard drives are caused by the drive developing bad media: this is a common problem that can’t be repaired but if we get to the drive soon enough, it’s still possible to recover the data (see this link for more on bad media). In this case though, the fault was not due to bad media, but to a very weak head inside the hard drive. Here’s what the Data Clinic recovery engineer wrote about the job when I asked him:

The symptoms of the failure describe a weak head, but this was far from a straight forward recovery. Firstly we converted this is a SATA drive using a compatible PCB [these drives don’t have a SATA interface, instead they feature a USB interface hardwired onto the drive’s controller board], this then gave access to the ROM and the firmware. This drive was suffering from the well known ‘Slow Responding’ firmware failure which was the first thing we fixed. Upon testing the sectors we noticed that H1 [head 1 – one of the read/write heads inside the hard drive] was reading, but very poorly.

As the customer was after specific data, we cloned the $MFT area and recovered as much data off the 3 working heads before we conducted a head change.

I then set about reading the MicroJog information to find a compatible head donor, luckily we had one that wasn’t the best for the other heads but perfect for the failing H1. Heads 0,2,3 were fully cloned and then the head change was conducted, the remaining data areas where then cloned – we managed a perfect clone.

The data was then recovered to return media.

Problem with a WD10TMVW ?

Do you have a problem with a Western Digital WD10TMVW hard drive? Perhaps you are experiencing the same symptoms as the drive above or maybe the drive has failed in a different way? There are lots of ways a hard drive can develop problems – contact us for help and advice.

data recovery, microjog, western digital

Data Clinic Reviews

Data Clinic Ltd

4.5

Jacob Greenwood

14:38 30 Mar 18

5* customer service! Recovered my father's book from an old drive, also retrieved some long forgotten about photos. Simply cant put a price on something like that.

Jarek Roover

12:21 30 Jul 18

Go there if you lost your data

Tony Cowgill

15:56 10 Apr 13

We've used Data Clinic twice now - once for my son's laptop which held all his University work and suddenly seemed to just die, that was recovered with ease. And then secondly in connection with work when our office computer system backups were somehow corrupted. These people really know their stuff - they are very helpful and professional and quick! Thanks so much for everything.

Rob Deighton

11:33 09 Dec 16

Happy to recommend Data Clinic to anybody that suffered Data Loss on storage Media. The guys were extremely helpful and knowledgeable and made the recovery of our valuable data a stress free experience.

George Thorpe

12:19 20 Feb 14

My company provides IT support to approximately 60 Yorkshire based companies ranging from small 10-15 users up to Enterprise sized organizations. Due to disk failure a client recently lost their entire database. We contacted Data Clinic and within hours a representative was onsite, several hours later the drive was returned, again in person by Data Clinic Manchester. I would not hesitate contacting them again, outstanding service in a market that can mean life or death to a business. 10 stars if there was an option!

Kieran Collins

21:02 25 Oct 18

Fantastic. Could not fault them at all, Brilliant, 10 year old iMac full of data and they had the data back to me in 72 hours. Communication via e-mail was fast, clear and superb.

David Tett

14:36 24 Aug 18

Sent them a 4tb WD Red hard drive to recover. They quoted me £588 incl VAT and recovery media. I was a bit sceptical so I asked for it to be returned. First they sent me the wrong hard drive (a 500GB WD Blue). Not too careful about data protection then. When I eventually got the drive back it had been totally stripped and outer casing binned (would have been nice to know about this beforehand). I decided to send it to Curry's PC World. They quoted £90 + recovery media. All data recovered and both hard drives returned within a week. What more is there to say.

Elle Sweet

22:12 20 Aug 18

Awful communication, I was constantly chasing them for updates on my device. My device was with them days before work was started on it. The data this company couldn’t retrieve was later retrieve by Apple. Waste of a £110.

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