Pickle's Misadventures as a Data Recovery Engineer

[Pickles von Brine]

So, long time ago on OCN I made a thread called Xeb's Misadventures as a Data Recovery Engineer. Since OCN, well, is OCN I figured I would finally revive what I use to do. If anyone is interested I will post interesting cases that I run across, issues I hit, etc. Come along for the ride! My job ain't ever boring. I will make my first post later this weekend if I get time. 

Just so you guys  know, here are the rules I am following:

1) I will not reveal where I work. I prefer to stay private. Please and thank you. 
2) I will not go into crazy detail. This is for fun, not engineering
3) I will have a lot of things redacted for client privacy. So if you see things blacked out it is for good reason. 
4) This will not be updated regularly. 


For now I have:
1) A WD drive with damaged translator
2) Seagate drive with firmware issues an inability to write w/ media cache damage and crashing firmware. 
3) A HORRIBLY degraded SSD
4) A RAID 6 that has some funny business. - Still waiting on approval. 

[Pickles von Brine]

To satiate some of you people. here is an example of what I sometimes run across. This one got away. 

[TimedPing]

1 minute ago, Pickles von Brine said:

So, long time ago on OCN I made a thread called Xeb's Misadventures as a Data Recovery Engineer. Since OCN, well, is OCN I figured I would finally revive what I use to do. If anyone is interested I will post interesting cases that I run across, issues I hit, etc. Come along for the ride! My job ain't ever boring. I will make my first post later this weekend if I get time. 

Probably you can help me recover my "rain water brined" Toshiba 320GB slim laptop drive I still keep from my undergraduate college days as an experiment, its contain about 100GB of meme dump and my thesis research data and related document that completely gone and I forced to rewrite the whole 850 pages of it

[Pickles von Brine]

1 minute ago, TimedPing said:

Probably you can help me recover my "rain water brined" Toshiba 320GB slim laptop drive I still keep from my undergraduate college days as an experiment, its contain about 100GB of meme dump and my thesis research data and related document that completely gone and I forced to rewrite the whole 850 pages of it

Depending on the conditions of the platters and rom it may be recoverable.

[TimedPing]

1 minute ago, Pickles von Brine said:

Depending on the conditions of the platters and rom it may be recoverable.

well, hopefully, since its soaked on my jeans pocket during a 150KM/h rainstorm ride with my motorcycle back in 2019 (I use it as external drive). Just realize it the next morning when I want to wash it and I quickly put it in my patio roof, directly in 38°c tropical sun heatwave.

[Pickles von Brine]

3 minutes ago, TimedPing said:

well, hopefully, since its soaked on my jeans pocket during a 150KM/h rainstorm ride with my motorcycle back in 2019 (I use it as external drive). Just realize it the next morning when I want to wash it and I quickly put it in my patio roof, directly in 38°c tropical sun heatwave.

I DM'd you. 

[Pickles von Brine]

Some past work. Flash drive with a broken connnector and ripped pads with torn traces. 


WD spyglass drive with sata conversion. 
 

Me fixing an opps. I damaged a trace and had to make a bodge wire on the drive above. Yes, those are tweezers I used for scale. This is at approx 50x mag.

 

[da na]

Now THAT is impressive. 

[Pickles von Brine]

1 minute ago, da na said:

Now THAT is impressive. 

Yep. Still not sure what the person was doing.... They said they were trying to into the drive. That was literally all the notes on the case. XD Crazy enough if they do approve it can be partially recovered but man it is going to take some work. I envy the guy who has to work on it (not me)

[da na]

Just now, Pickles von Brine said:

Yep. Still not sure what the person was doing.... They said they were trying to into the drive. That was literally all the notes on the case. XD

Just wait until they learn about screwdrivers

[Pickles von Brine]

1 minute ago, da na said:

Just wait until they learn about screwdrivers

I am thinking this was not intentional. Maybe they were attempting to remove the drive from its enclosure and got a little spirited. 

[Pickles von Brine]

Okay so here is a case I am working on:
1) A WD drive with damaged translator
Problem with modern WD 2.5" (and any WD drive with SMR) is there are not one but TWO translators in the drives. One is for the physical area of the drive, the second is for the SMR, and thus your data. This second module is called Module 190. Loose it, kiss your data good bye. The drives I see a lot are WD's 2.5" family of modern drives with SMR:
Palmer - 1TB
Charger - 2TB
Spyglass series (there are 4 drives in the spyglass series...) - 3-5TB
These are any drives made since about 2016-2017 are these families. 
Second is is that modern WD 2.5" drives have encryption keys embedded in the drive controller. Controller dies? Keys go with it. Swap the wrong ROM on the wrong board? Keys go with it. Some of the older spyglass, charger and palmer drives you can swap PCBs and convert them from USB to sata. New drives? You can do that for access to modules but you will have no data access till you use the original PCB. The conversion process I won't go into detail here as this is just for fun. But either way, below is an example of what is needed to convert these drives from USB to Sata when you need the original PCB. 
 

Spoiler

Right now I have a drive that lost its Module 190 mid recovery. Thankfully I backup all drive resources as soon as I have access to them to avoid this issue. This way you can repair/restore/recover modules as needed. However, there are other firmware issues preventing me from just writing back backup of the currently and now dead module. Second is why the module became dead in the first place? I am suspecting it became corrupt due to the weak head. However, I am unsure. Sadly Module 190 issues are rather common... Especially when there is damage to the outer edge of the platter where modules live.  There are ways to get past damaged 190 but that is beyond what I can do. However, our lab has resources to handle these things. Something to me that is freaking witchcraft.