Sometimes it is very difficult to correctly diagnose a drive: the symptoms one is facing can be confusing and can lead you in the wrong direction. We received a RAID 0 system, made up of 2 drives. One of them was completely unresponsive, it had no sign of life when powered on.In such situations, the first issue that comes to mind is a major PCB failure; so you have two solutions: replace it with a matching PCB that you know works, or try to repair the damaged board.Well, this time the PCB swap didn't help at all.
We checked all the other components and they were fine; at the end of a long process we found that the problem was in the ROM chip: the firmware had suffered a severe corruption.The word Firmware is related to a collection of small programs, this is what “controls” the hardware to put it simply. Usually, such microprograms are stored mainly on a Read Only Memory chip and partly on the platters.
Nowadays almost all modern intelligent devices have a firmware onboard that oversees the proper functioning of the device. Maybe you have experienced it with your digital camera or mobile phone: A Firmware upgrade results in a totally new behaviour (hopefully better) of your device. Well, in our drives case, the FW damages prevented the PCB working at all. Here come the real issues. Every Hard disk firmware stores some unique information, belonging to that specific drive, vital to its correct functioning: you cannot simply take a FW from another drive and overwrite it. So, we started a real handcraft job trying to reconstruct the damaged FW modules cutting and sewing from other drives.
Our efforts have been rewarded: the customer was very pleased to be able to have his data back in fully working condition!
R3 Data Recovery is real lab that deals with real disasters each an every day. If you have RAID that has failed or any data storage device, we are the people to contact. Call us today on 0800 999 3282 for immediate help and assistance.