Fixing a Fault on a Seagate ST500DM0002

I’ve noticed a peculiar problem on some Seagate ST500DM0002 hard drives where the drive will start, making all the usual sounds and come ready but will not identify itself to the system – the drive ID is blank. This is usually after some catastrophic event forces the computer to shut down suddenly, eg. the power supply is removed without warning etc.

In this particular instance this hard drive came to my attention when I was asked by a reader of the http://www.recover-deleted-data.co.uk/ blog for help and assistance in recovering the data from one of these drives with these specific symptoms.

Examining the drive further with a low level hard drive repair tool I first tested the drive’s heads, which passed without error. I noticed that the drive’s system files were readable but the service modules couldn’t be read (despite them being listed). The drive’s translator table loaded correctly so I was starting to believe that the ST500DM0002 has some sort of firmware bug.

Examination of system file 346 showed it to be damaged. Replacing this file with one from a compatible spare resulted in the problem being eliminated and the drive now works perfectly again.

Forensic Acquisition

Acquisition is one of the most critical steps on the digital forensics process. If acquisition is not carried out properly, there is often little that can be done to recover the situation. The acquisition process is based on a very simple principle, which is to obtain a forensic copy of the original digital evidence without changing the state of the original evidence or using the principle of least intrusion or destruction.
This typically means applying a standard procedure using verified tools to produce a verified forensic copy. The processes and tools each need quality assurance processes applied rigorously to them. Likewise the personnel need testing in proficiency of use for these tools.

• Acquisition should be conducted only through the use of documented procedures using verified tools operated by proficient personnel that are peer reviewed and tested
• External validation of these processes is also a very good idea and for some laboratories my be a requirement
• The processes themselves should use standardised documentation for the production of reports
• The processes and documentation should be subject to regular review

The Quality Assurance (‘QA’) involved in the acquisition phase should be a relatively simple process. The procedure for acquiring the image of a hard disk, for example, should rarely change. The main focus here will be on assuring that procedure has been followed rigurously and that this can be readily substantiated using valid science. In addition, the software and hardware tools and the personnel should be subjected to relevant standards of verification and proficiency.

What Do Data Recovery Companies Do ?

If you lose a file on your computer then the action you usually take is to go to your recycle bin and get it back. Easy. But what happens if you’ve deleted the file from there too? Situations like this often require companies that are specialists in retrieving files and folders from your computer. These specialists are known as data recovery companies and they handle every type of file lose – from deleted files right through to recovering the data from hard drives that have been smashed and been involved in fires.

I was recently fortunate enough to spend the day at Datlabs (http://www.datlabs.co.uk/), a prestigious data recovery and hard drive specialist based in England. Here’s a typical enquiry that they receive:

Hi, was wondering if you can give me some advice. I have a seagate external HDD (4TB, exFAT formatted) that I use on both windows and OS X operating systems. It has stopped working. I dropped it yesterday (it was not plugged in at the time and only fell about 10cm, but that could still be enough to damage it) and initially my macbook pro was able to recognise and read from it, but I ejected it and since then have not been able to get the Mac to see the drive. I have tried a windows machine at work, which installed the drivers automatically when the drive was connected, but the partition does not appear under my computer. Disk management under windows 7 can see the drive but it has no drive letter assigned and the only option that is not greyed out is to initialise the drive. I don’t want to format or initialise as the data is important to me (it is mostly backed up, but I have substantially reorganised the photos and music on the drive, and therefore would prefer to try and recover it). I have had similar problems with another drive in the past, however, my concern is that it is a mechanical issue, as the drive powers up, spins up and then stops.
What do you charge for assessment and data recovery and what kind of time frame does it normally take?

Spending the afternoon in the Datlabs lab I was able to see for myself how they recover data and how they fault find on hard drives. A drive that powers up and then powers down without being recognised is a dead ringer for a mechanical type failure, and mechanical failures are the worst type of hard drive fault because this usually means that the hard drive has sustained some physical damage that is preventing the hard drive working properly. It’s usually necessary to fix this fault (often by replacing parts) to get the drive working again and getting access to the data.

A Journey from Manchester to Matlock

Matlock is the district administration centre of Derbyshire and is situated above the Midlands cities of Stoke and Birmingham, and below the North West belt of Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.

Despite lying between Birmingham and Manchester, which are both big cities with much commerce, including the offices of Data Clinic in both locations, Derbyshire is surprisingly difficult to get around. One of the big reasons for this is the Peak District and Derbyshire Dales – both of which are known as Green Belt areas, which are designated areas of beauty and very difficult to build on, or put roads through. It’s because of this that a journey from Manchester to Matlock will take roughly 90 minutes, despite the distance only being in the region of 40 or so miles.

From Manchester you would head out through Hyde before joining the M67 for a few miles to Hattersley. From there you head to Glossop which is your first town in Derbyshire. Heading through Glossop puts you on the Snake Pass, a windy and often treacherous road before turning right at Bamford and heading across the reservoir taking you into Hathersage. From Hathersage you pick up the A6 road to Bakewell and finally on to Matlock.

This is a journey that will take you through many areas of beauty and Derbyshire is a big attraction for tourists each year. Just outside Matlock is the spa town of Matlock Bath and a little further is the hidden gem of Crich, with it’s Tramway Museum. Here many episodes of Peak Practice were filmed and it’s possible to walk on many of the local footpaths that were seen during filming.

SanDisk DDR SSD!?

One of the leading manufacturer’s of flash storage devices, SanDisk has announced a quite groundbreaking product. Basically, an SSD (Solid State Drive) that fits in a RAM slot.

In the battle for read / write data transfer speeds, SSDs are seen as the top product to get. Typically an SSD is a laptop sized hard drive, but there have been quite a number of PCI / PCI-E SSDs – due to the fact that the storage device is actually on the motherboard of a computer, this makes the read / write transfer speeds a lot quicker and with standard SATA connectors.

Typical example of a PCI SSD

As I was mentioning, SanDisk have come up with something quite unique. The fastest possible method of access from a computer to any data is the RAM. SanDisk have utilised this and come up with a 200GB and 400GB SSD that sits in a RAM slot.

It is not intended to be used for home users, but companies that use servers. Due to the fact that RAM is a volatile form of memory and servers are never intended to be powered off, thus it seems like a good match to combine these technologies.

It seems that this is the final point in the frontier against data and latency, as of yet, no prices have been announced, but as with any new technology, it is not likely going to be a cheap product.

http://www.sandisk.co.uk/enterprise/ulltradimm-ssd/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULLtraDIMM

Details:

• 5 Microsecond latency
• DDR3 interface
• Random Read Input Output Per Second (IOPS) of 140K
• Random Write IOPS of 44K
• Sequential Read of 880MB/Sec
• Sequential Write of 660 MB/Sec
• Flexible Redundant Array of Elements (F.R.A.M.E) data fail technology
• SanDisk’s DataGuard Technology

Just what is it designed for?

Due to the amount of data businesses use, this method of storage is designed to cope with vastly quick amounts of data transfers, ideal for large databases, and financial transactions. It does seem like this is the optimum we are able to achieve in terms of the speed of data transfer.

Recovering and Improving CCTV Images and Sounds

Like them or loathe them CCTV cameras are a part of modern day life. A walk through a city centre or a car journey on a busy road are likely to be recorded. Used mainly as a deterrent, CCTV cameras record video and audio information that can be played back and watched in order to gather evidence should some form of crime have been committed.

By it’s very very nature crime is often committed undercover of darkness and because of this, the video and audio information recorded can be of poor quality. Also if criminals are aware that their actions may be recorded by CCTV equipment they are likely to seek out and damage the equipment so that the information recorded is lost.

Specialist CCTV recovery companies (see http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/cctv-data-recovery/) are often able to recover the data from CCTV systems when problems with the image and sound recovery are encountered. Perhaps the video recorder (often referred to as a DVR) has been damaged or the footage has been lost for other reasons. Another extremely useful facility companies like Data Clinic Ltd provide is the ability to enhance the quality of both the pictures and sound recorded by these CCTV systems. Grainy images can be cleaned up to provide near pin point sharp images, similarly with audio and other sound recordings too.

Police forces and other law agencies have found recovering the data from CCTV systems that were once thought broken to be of great advantage. Also image and audio improvements allow features such as numberplates and faces to be more readily identifiable.

Do you need a professional to recover your data?

Do You Need A Professional To Recover Data From A Disk Drive? 

Isn’t it amazing how hard drives and storage space have changed in the last 10 years? Drives could have be measure in Kilobytes, Backing-Up data could be a chore and corruption of drives was as typical as it is now. it’s rather mind blowing to consider the progression of hard-disk drive space for storage in the last decade. It was rare to get drives computed in Megabytes. One might have thought that these drives would fail on a relatively consistent basis. Also, backing-up data than it is today an issue was a much more wide-ranging and complicated.

Generally speaking, computers (including hard disk drives ) have become cheaper and much more efficient. Some money can be saved by a lot of people when they know how to construct their own computer. The hard-drives content only can be more expensive compared to the real computer in some instances.

There are a lot of choices you can use, in regards to burning data. Plenty of new computer may have some type of back-up available, like cloud storage. Microsoft gives you so much space of cloud storage on their SkyDrive service. External drives are well-known and are great at the things they do, they are also affordable. Seeing there are tons of various kinds of medium you can use to back up your data, it seems providential that so many individuals (and companies ) have disk failures.

Hard disk faults are a genuine danger. The most popular cause of data corruption is estimated to be corruption of the HDD. The next largest factor which impacts your data is if something bad happens with the actual computer that the HDD is operating on. Exposure to hackers is a sure means to get rid of data, but the truth of the problem is the fact that hard drive failure is a much more frequent reason for data loss.

The data on a HDD is saved on a platter (disk) which has a magnetic layer to it. That is where your data is truly saved. These discs rotate at highspeed, they have a head that can study and create data to and from your drive (just like a vinyl Long Play record). The drive itself features a control that regulates the unit; furthermore, the motor in the drive revolves the platters.

These devices may be somewhat simple yet they are able to go wrong in several things which will cause these drives to perish. From now and again, drives will fail for just one reason or another. Most of the time, all these are changed, not fixed. Nevertheless, there are some specialist data recovery companies that will retrieve data that you might consider lost.

There are other reasons why drives become redundant. A hard disk drive in itself may be perfectly operational, but the pc it is connected to might possess some sort of fault that is making the drive inaccessible by the normal way.

There are many reasons a hard drive can fail, it is essential to realize that even though you might change out your pc for a few hundred pounds, the data on your drive could be worth considerably more, whether its sentimental value or the actual value. 

If a PC is simply typically used in the house you may lose tax records, software or school-work

hard disk drive

if your drive fails, when the PC is used in a business.


All of the problems that hard disk drives have can be tackled by way of a data recovery professional, when the drive itself has failed they can use machines that will read broken drives, if your pc has failed they can remove the drive and study it with another computer and then regain the data you desire.


If you are not familiar with the method that disk drives perform, it could be better if you didn’t attempt recovery yourself. You might cause more harm than you had in the first place. The modest investment that you’ll make in getting your important data back is going to be inclined to save you a lot of money and frustration in the near future.

Preparing for the worst is the best way to ensure your data is secure, any great data recovery specialist will manage to tell you procedures of safeguarding your data against hard drive failure, it’s wise to contact a professional before you lose anything to make sure that you’ve got sufficient protection or fail safes just in case anything does go wrong, as I’m certain you’ll concur keeping your company or private data secure warrants some precautions.


Every hard drive will have to go some time, it’s bound to occur, you can breathe a sigh of relief if you know you have copied your documents though. Backing up your work, other prized files along with pictures is not difficult to do and is affordable, well, compared against the expense of losing that data.

A data recovery expert needs to be sought after as soon as you start experiencing drive dilemmas. In times ahead, it may be possible you’ll detect a specialist who will help you to defend your data in the first place. You needn’t panic as data recovery specialists exist plus they understand what they’re doing, only call one. 

Servers

All about servers and data recovery

For businesses, servers will probably be in place. Servers are pretty much a big variety of tools that perform several tasks. I shall try to explain what the primary tasks are of servers and what can happen when they go wrong.

A server will likely have been configured by some technical boffin; they know about the intricacies of servers and will consequently have a great knowledge of what a server is and what each bit does. These technically informed folks are the ones which you should turn to, if a trouble isn’t too devastating.

The primary part of a server is the position where data is saved. Essentially, that’s all a server does, store and deliver data; obviously it does considerably more sophisticated procedure than that. Firstly, a regular server is going to have a lot of network cables, from several switches. These will be fed through a primary switch and go via a firewall to shield outgoing and incoming data from the internet.

Whatever the case, an incredibly important area is that where data is saved. For those who have a server with warehousing space, you will know by the indication of a network drive on your computer in some place, that place is where you have data saved. Hard disk drives set up in a RAID are likely to be the solution behind this. RAID is where many hard disk drives are joined in such a way that the computer will recognise them as one drive place. Eg.. network drives.

If your business was merrily working away off this server, what would it be like to have a disc fail on you? So that it is possible to all get back to work immediately, you’d need to understand how to get the server back online. First thing you may do is contact the folks inside the INFORMATION technology department, or whoever it was that set up the server.

The IT department may be able to give you a sign of what is erroneous, if the hard disk drives have failed you’re most likely to require a Data Recovery expert. This is primarily due to the fact that RAIDS have become complicated and shouldn’t be attempted to be messed with if the man doesn’t know what they are doing. There are a Number Of Companies that may recover your data for those who have lost it, you need to contact them when you’re able to.

At the end of the day, servers are fine, they perform many tasks and tend to be crucial for businesses, that is why when they fail (because all mechanical products eventually will fail) it could be catastrophic for businesses because in the event your server goes down and all your employees are functioning off it. They are not going to be able to keep on working. This is the reason it is of utmost importance to take the broken server drives to the proper place, you don’t need anyone unqualified to be poking around with all the hdds as it might cause data becoming less and less recoverable whenever they do something.

The importance of CCTV

Burglary is an issue for many businesses. Businesses will regularly haven’t any protection from burglars, when you have guards, as security officers are pricey, it is no warranty they’ll aid a whole lot if there is an act of robbery occurring. I’ve never worked anywhere where there have been security guards, CCTV has always been sufficient, well, I’m only a web developer.  Closed-Circuit Tv (CCTV) DVR Methods are a comparatively economical method of securely viewing your venture all the time. CCTV is naturally a deterrent for stealing as individuals will feel they’re being viewed, as you’d expect. It’s made a lot easier to establish something if you have CCTV DVR to backup your statements, if someone does commit robbery.

As you are likely aware of, Closed-Circuit TV systems empower one to possess a watching ‘eye’ over your website pretty much all day daily. These CCTV systems are adaptable and can be set up in various modes, depending on cost and security constraints. Firstly, each camera must be fitted in all the applicable locations around the building(s). It is preferable that the angles of the cameras overlap to prevent any potential blind spots which will not be used for their function.

There are lots of set ups accessible for CCTV cameras. These are usually very little and can be typically attached to a ceiling/wall. These cleverly disguise the genuine course of the camera making it more it more laborious to prevent. If there is no light, or really little (not enough to be able to make out a picture), you can implement cameras that discover thermal signatures. You can buy cameras that look as though they are not cameras, hence no one is anticipating that they are being recorded. The recommended pick of CCTV camera would have to be one that has many advantages such as zoom cameras and tilt-shift where the camera can be controlled from elsewhere.

These cams will then broadcast the signals real time to your digital video recorder (DVR) device. This if regularly managed using a fixed coaxial cable similar to what one would use with a standard television. Yet, many newer camera designs features wireless technology to deliver signals straight to recording devices. This makes installation much easier and makes it difficult for a burglar to cut out the signal by simply severing a cable. On the other hand, the signals could be theoretically jammed by a high powered radio signal of the appropriate frequency.

You could have various kinds of DVR set ups. Some are PC based. All these are just regular PCs configured to accept signals from the cams surveiling an establishment. These take the signals from the cams and just save the images on the internal hard drive. This sort of set up is quite adaptable in that one typically has a lot of storage space and access to the most efficient video file formats with the upgrade of the latest operating systems. These are also normally easy to install and integrate with a network. Supplementing your system with upgrades and new software is also easy.

The main negative thing as the main storage device of CCTV data in having a pc is you could run the chance of your pc crashing. If this happened during a robbery, you would have no footage (which is the entire purpose of having CCTV). Or if equipment got damaged, you would need to try and restore it back to working health in order to get it to play videos, specialist CCTV recovery companies might need to be contacted

Digital Video Recording systems are designed and used only with the aim of this were produced to be able to fight the possible faults of PCs. The specific size of normal DVRs is like a big DVD player or VHS player. This kind of DVR is similar to that of a TV DVR, as the device gets and saves the footage on a hard disk drive that is internal to the system. It is difficult to update these kinds of systems nevertheless, meaning that the technology in it might be out of date and could be holding your security back.

The best thing got from network established DVR systems is the capacity to control the actions of a cam from a remote location. All of the CCTV data is transmitted by a router over the net in order to be viewable off the main site. As a matter of fact, such a device is able to stream the recording (as it happens) to said DVR that is not at the premises. This could be done as another tier of security. This also helps in preventing a burglar from damaging the recording equipment and intruding further.

CCTV DVR methods are a superb way to get a company to boost up its on-site safety. These systems supply a lot of flexibility in tracking a location in a variety of places and recording the data for future usage. These systems symbolize a robber’s worst nightmare, whether it be a common burglar or a rogue employee trying to pocket some additional cash from the register.

Data Centres

Data Centres

Data centres are the backbone of nearly all big search engines like Google and storage businesses they use considerable amounts of computers that have mass-storage equipment connected, as there is a lot of computers you may expect some to fail, therefor data centres have backup power supplies and batteries to power the machines if anything bad happens.

Pollution is a primary variable for data centres, as a result of the quantity they generate they are required by law to utilize special equipment, but they sometimes use as much power as a village simply because they use so much equipment.

There’s a specific topology that data centres need to use, the topology may be scaled to any proportion therefore any data centre can use it no matter how big they may be, also the equipment that is used has to fulfill certain environmental requirements, they have these limitations so that the basic infrastructure is exactly the same.

There are definite rules about what data centres can use their gear for, they are listed below:

• Provide data centre established programs straight to the supplier ‘s clients
• Control and handle a phone company’s telecoms network
• Dispense hosted applications for a third party to provide services using their customers
• Give a selection of those and associated data centre plans

Most data centres use what’s known as a transformation initiative to change the way they work it is done in endeavors to split up the work load, these endeavors are generally named; automation, protection, virtualisation & standardisation.

Data centres must strive to stay at the leading edge of technologies. They accomplish this by getting all the most recent devices that offer better functionality and storage space. They also look to enhance networking capabilities in the hope that the quantity of data centres might be handled better, and eventually decrease (because there are lots of them around)

Visualization is where devices that are utilised in the data centre are joined for example one device could run multiple virtual servers, this amounts to less space being used, less operational costs plus it reduces energy use, virtualisation also allows for data centres to offer virtual desktops to customers.

This is the procedure for sorting out different jobs that need to be performed, like patching, configuring, launch management and sorting out provisions. Each of these factors are automated to an extent. This again helps to decrease the price of a data centre.

Security is crucial for almost any business, for data centres, it is certainly no exception. Data centres are normally colossal in proportion as well as thus demand lots of security. Security over the physical security as well as network security must be considered.
Data centres home plenty of data, including private information, as you’d expect, it is therefore vital that the computer-related, equally physical and security is kept constantly.

Below is a table that shows the different tiers:

The distinction in the numbers might appear little but it all depends on the server, having no down time is perfect but each tier allows to get a specific amount of down time annually.

➢ Tier 1 – 99.671 percentage status would give 1729.224 minutes
➢ Tier 2 – 99.741 percentage status would give 1361.304 minutes
➢ Tier 3 – 99.982 percentage status would give 94.608 minutes
➢ Tier 4 – 99.995 percentage status would give 26.28 minutes