A home user from Reading emailed the recovery experts at the lab regarding a failed Hitachi laptop hard drive which was very old and contained over 10 years of family photos and home movies that were priceless.
Here is the case study of the Hitachi DK23AA-12 hard drive:
The hard drive was an internal storage media 2.5” form factor that utilized Windows 98 and a data partition.
Diagnosis:
Our recovery team realized that due to the age of the Hitachi hard drive and the reported symptoms prior to the complete failure that the HDD would have internal issues after inspecting the disk in the clean room it was diagnosed as having head and preamplifier failure this was a complex recovery that required a rare parts to be sourced and installed into the failing hard drive following this a full bit by bit copy was performed of all user data.
Spec of this Hitachi DK23AA-12 hard disk drive:
12.07 GB Maximum storage capacity
Manufactured September 2001
Interface PATA
Rotation speed 4200RPM
Transfer rate: PIO 4 16MBS
512 KB cache
What was the outcome?
11Gb of data was recovered the Hitachi hard disk was completely full up with no room available this would have compounded the failure as the head stack would have had to work harder trying to locate and shift the data about and deal with the swap file further to this the age of the hard drive and components showed it was well beyond its lifecycle and MTBF and had given years of superb service the user was completely overwhelmed with all the recovered data.