A captain from the Royal marines based in Afghanistan recently contacted our labs for help with precious family photos that were stored on a failed hard drive, the client shipped the hard drive directly to our labs following an email exchange.
Here is the case study of the WD5000KMVV-11BG7S0 hard drive:
The system in this particular case was sent to our lab was a Western Digital model number WD5000KMVV-11BG7S0; it was stored in an external enclosure for ease of use and data access, the hard drive utilizes a USB type connection rather than SATA.
Diagnosis:
The hard drive was taken to the clean room labs for further examination as the client had reported strange noises being emitted from the disk enclosure, the heads had landed directly onto the disk surface or platters as they are called, this can be a common issue with portable media and can be caused by a variety of issues, such as excess heat, very rapid power down or an internal problem with the hard drive.
Spec of this Western Digital WD5000KMVV-11BG7S0 hard disk drive:
500 GB total storage capacity
Manufactured June 2010
5400RPM
Y Type USB connection
SmartWare Encryption
8MB cache
Transfer rate: 3GB/s
What was the outcome?
Our lab dealt with the internal issue in the clean room then immediately cloned all user data area from this the file system was reconstructed and examined by an engineer who then created as full folder and file listing and sent it to the customer for approval, this was agreed and the data which was all family and personal photos was burnt to DVD and shipped back to the delighted client.