Formatted Hard Drive

Oops - I accidentally formatted my hard drive. We hear this quite often. It can be very easy to accidentally format your drive or the wrong drive.

Luckily the Engineers at ReWave are experts at performing formatted hard drive data recovery. It is important after formatting the drive that you not re-install the operating system or put any files on the drive.

In most cases, 99% of data can be recovered. Having a formatted hard drive doesn't have to mean that your data is lost.

Access is Denied error

The access is denied error message typically means that data is password protected with the EFS "Encrypted File System". This can cause important data to become inaccessible if a password is forgotten or an employee is no longer with the company.

The data recovery engineers at ReWave Data Recovery can recover data from files, folders and hard drives that have the access is denied error message.

Corrupt Partition

A Corrupt Partition or Corrupt Partition Table can occur because of different logical problems with a hard drive. Unfortunately its a very common occurrence but almost always the data beyond the partition is okay.

A Corrupt Partition Data Recovery expert such as one of our Engineers can quickly (usually within a day) decipher the exact cause of the problem and repair it or at a minimum recover the corrupted data.

Hard Drive Motor Failed

Every hard drive has a motor. This motor can fail because of several different reasons. The hard drive motor can spin too fast, too slow or not at all. It could also spin up and then attempt to operate at the necessary speed but be unable to maintain the speed necessary for the read/write arm to navigate across the sectors of the platter(s).

Just because your hard drive motor failed, this does not mean that your data is lost. Our Engineers can repair or replace the motor or its parts if necessary. Having a hard drive with a failed motor and no backup means you will definitely need the services of a data recovery company.

MFT file outside of bounds

MFT (Master File Table) files are found on NTFS partitions and assist Windows by having multiple copies if one becomes corrupt. The MFT contains attributes about the actual files saved in that area of the hard drive.

For many reasons MFT files can become corrupt. There is one error in particular, "MFT file outside of bounds" that can make it difficult to get your data.

Our team has proprietary software and hardware systems designed to recover data after repairing the MFT's or circumventing them altogether. MFT data recovery is not easy but for a data recovery Engineer it is very common.

Outlook repair

Microsoft Outlook files can become extremely large and that can create corruption in the file because of its size and how it is spread out over the hard drive. Most large files don't take up continuous blocks on a hard drive but instead are spread out over many (fragmented).

Outlook data recovery or Outlook file repair can be performed by our Engineers. Its always a good idea to archive less important emails after cleaning up and deleting all unnecessary emails (especially those with attachments).

If you are having difficulty opening your Outlook file because of corruption or and error message, its a good idea to talk with a data recovery Engineer.

Digital Picture Card Recovery

Digital Picture Cards are one of the generic terms used for cards that hold pictures and video in digital cameras and camcorders. Most of these cards do not have moving parts inside but are flash based units.

In addition to physical damage and accidental formatting, these cards can become defective because of many reasons. Digital Picture Card Recovery can be performed to recover pictures and/or video that was lost due to many reasons.

The most important thing to remember is to immediately stop using the camera/card as soon as you realize there is a problem.

Broken RAID

A broken RAID is simply a RAID that will not boot. It is possible that several things have happened. There could be a physically defective RAID controller, logically or physically damaged RAID drives or other problems.

A broken RAID 5 does not mean that your important data is lost. One of the most important things to consider when your broken array won't boot is to be careful what steps you perform. We do not recommend running chkdsk or any other type of disk repair program on either a single drive or the entire array.

With that said, a broken RAID can generate some downtime but doesn't have to mean you won't get your data back. Our Engineers perform RAID data recovery every day.

What is RAID 10?

RAID 10 is getting a lot more exposure these days. RAID 10 is basically a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1 (drives are first mirrored and then striped). RAID 10 is frequently used because it is a highly reliable RAID level. Since there are multiple sets of mirrors, a RAID 10 can actually survive the failure of more than one disk as long as these disks do not belong to the same mirrored set.

RAID 10 data recovery is more advanced, but our Engineers have recovered many broken RAID 10 arrays. Our expertise is not only with RAID levels 0, 1, and 5 but also nested levels such as 10 and 0+1.

What is eSATA?

The new eSATA standard is for connecting devices externally that contain SATA technology. These new eSATA devices have many advantages most notably their speed. eSATA hard drives are faster than USB 2.0 and FireWare 400 hard drives.

The only real drawback to these new eSATA devices is that they must have a separate cable for power. Most people don't really care about that unless they are heavy travelers and don't want to lug around one more cable.

Our eSATA data recovery can recover these new devices. eSATA disk recovery is only different in that the connectors have changed. The "L" shaped SATA plug is replaced with a straight plug.

Destripe a RAID

Even though RAID servers have built in fault tolerance, RAID systems do fail. As always, having a recent backup that has been verified is the best way to be confident that your companies critical data won't be lost.

When RAID systems do fail and a backup was not made or was corrupt, it is necessary for the data to be destriped from the drives by a data recovery company that has experience with all RAID levels.

It's imperative that all of the parameters of the array be known such as: number of drives in the RAID (array), order of the drives and stripe size.

Amber Light on RAID Server

Has your RAID server crashed? If your RAID won't mount and you have more than one hard drive with an amber light, serious and permanent data loss can occur. Our RAID Data Recovery team recovers several RAID servers every week with this issue.

An amber light or orange light (some people say error light or red light) on a hard drive can mean several different things. There could be sector corruption, head damage, of errors in the parity (if RAID5).

Data Recovery for SAS Hard Drives

Our data recovery lab has recently seen an increase in the number of SAS hard drives coming in for recovery. For those who are unfamiliar with this technology, SAS is "Serial Attached SCSI". SAS drives are becoming increasingly popular for their high speed data transfers. We primarily see SAS drives being used in commercial servers for critical applications. For example, SAS is currently being used in the Dell PowerEdge and Dell PowerVault lines. If you have experienced data loss or a failed SAS drive, it's important to find a data recovery company that can handle the job of recovery. ReWave specializes in data recovery for serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives.

Now for the joke of the day:

A customer had trouble installing software and rang for support. "I put in the first disk, and that was OK. It said to put in the second disk, and I had some problems with that disk. When it said to put in the third disk - I couldn't even fit it in.." The user hadn't realized that "Insert Disk 2" meant to remove Disk 1 first.