RAID technology overview: Proper and Improper Rebuild for RAID-1 (Mirror)

Posted on 10/28/2024 by ACELab team


Most RAID levels use redundancy to ensure the reliability of the array. Redundancy allows the array to continue operating without data loss if one of the drives fails. This technology was designed to save data, but if used improperly, it can lead to data loss.

In this article, we will look at the problem of an “improper rebuild”, which can make RAID data recovery very difficult or even impossible. This is a common mistake made by RAID storage users who try to restore the functionality of the array on their own. Only after failing to recover, they turn to a data recovery service. We will take a closer look at why people make this mistake.

As an example, we will use one of the easiest levels to understand — RAID-1 (Mirror). In such arrays, a complete copy of data is stored on all members (most often there are two). If one drive fails, all the data is on the other one.

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Work with AFH in Seagate F3 Utility

Posted on 09/09/2024 by ACELab team

Implementation of the tool in the utility was delayed for a long time because work with the heating parameters of the read-write head required extreme caution. An incorrect choice of tactics for work with a damaged drive will lead to a scratch – irreversible damage to the surface of the disks containing user data. Before moving on to work with the AFH wizard, we will briefly describe the technology. Its essence explains, why inappropriate work with it poses fatal risk to the HDD.

AFH (Adaptive Fly Height) is the system adjusting the flight altitude of the magnetic head slider section containing the writing and reading elements. For clarification, we shall refer to the following illustration from patent sources describing the technology.

 

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Posted in Data Extractor, PC-3000 HDD | 2 Comments

PC-3000 SSD Systems. The List of Supported SSDs (regularly updated, ver. 3.5.3)

Posted on 08/19/2024 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

The ACE Lab developers constantly research drives, which results in a rapid expansion of the Support List for most of the modern SSDs. So with the PC-3000 Systems that support Solid State Drives, you will always be on the cutting edge of
data recovery technology!

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Western Digital SMR. Formatted Drive Solution.

Posted on 03/06/2024 by ACELab team


Modern SMR drives are very sensitive due to a new shingled recording technology. The writing density becomes higher, and also, the internal processes in the drive firmware almost never stop. Even when the drive is idle, bands are rewritten to optimize data access. This is very good for data reading speed and increasing the amount of data written to the drive, but, unfortunately, sometimes this can be a reason of the internal processes fail, and the drive stops giving previously written data. Windows sees that the User Area is not allocated and automatically starts the format procedure. Yes, the drive is detected and works after that, but all the data on it disappears. The problem is that when formatting, the second-level translator also changes. What can be done in such a situation? Let’s look at it in this article.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | 14 Comments

PC-3000 Flash. The Importance of having a powerful PC (UPDATED FEB 2024)

Posted on 02/23/2024 by ACELab team

Hello Friends!

As you may already know Flash recovery requires many more hardware resources than data recovery with PC-3000 Express, PC-3000 UDMA or PC-3000 Portable III Systems. When you have to deal with HDDs, all complex operations are produced by the internal CPU on the drive’s PCB. But if you work with Flash devices, all the operations such as ECC correction, XOR decryption, page, and block splitting are applied within the PC-3000 Flash software.

Today we’re going to run some tests and show you the difference between various PCs configurations. In the end, the importance of having a good and stable PC configuration will become obvious. Also, do not hesitate to read our regularly updated article “The Best PC Configuration for the PC-3000 tools”.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 Flash | 11 Comments

A brick named Rosewood

Posted on 01/19/2024 by ACELab team

Disclaimer: the article is specially written in an easy form to simplify the perception of the information presented; despite this, the material should be taken as seriously as possible.

Currently, we receive a lot of modern SMR drives for data recovery, which output a huge number of messages to the terminal at startup, and eventually freeze without access via ATA or terminal. In this case, messages can end either with the output LED BD FAdr xxxx, or without this assertion. When resuscitating SMR drives with Media Cache, you should keep in mind that it accumulates updates with the latest write operations to the disk. The main risk area includes file system metadata – small portions of updates, for example, MFT records. In our practice, there were cases when a very significant part of the MFT was stored in the MC. At the same time, when reading without MC, sectors filled with zeros were read. Or an irrelevant “past life”. Therefore, any actions to gain access to SA must be calculated so that key data elements are not damaged during manipulation and restart of the drive. We will give examples of actions with frozen drives and their dangerous moments below.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | 4 Comments

PC-3000 SSD. How to choose the correct loader for SM2258XT/SM2259XT/XT2

Posted on 10/13/2023 by ACELab team

Hello everyone!

ACE Lab Technical Support department gets a lot of requests from your side about modern Solid State Drives based on such popular SMI controllers as SM2258XT, SM2259XT, SM2259XT2. All these controllers are fully supported in PC-3000 UDMA, Express and Portable III starting from 2020-2021, and now if you got one of these controllers in your target drive, we can try to guide you how to recover it.

Anyway, a huge number of requests from customer side makes us to write this article which could be a handy instruction – how to properly work with these drives and how we can initialize the correct loader.

Before we start, a short guide about the LOADER – what is that, and who is guilty?!

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PC-3000 HDD. Western Digital 4F ROM Module recovery mode

Posted on 08/07/2023 by ACELab team

Hello Friends! All of you already know that the PC-3000 can recover ROM from old Western Digital Marvell drives with External (in separate chip) and Internal (in MCU) ROM.  However, it was a problem to recover ROM from newer families, like HubbleLT, FBLite or Shrek due to their special ROM structure which includes some unique information in 4F ROM module.

In this article we are going to discuss how to recover ROM from Service Area for such drives using a new PC-3000 v7.3 feature – ROM module 4F recovery.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD, Video | 4 Comments

PC-3000 Flash 8.2.x – adding unsupported chip ID into the software

Posted on 07/24/2023 by ACELab team

Hey guys!

ACE Lab engineers regularly add new NAND memory chips into the PC-3000 Flash software database. Updates with the new XORs, NAND ID’s, ECC and dynamic XORs appears in Flash weekly. If our customer faced with the unsupported XOR or unknown chip ID, we’re trying our best to communicate with the customer and urgently add the required resources via remote control.

 

We are strongly recommending to contact ACE Lab TS because every modern unknown NAND chip has a lot of additional reading parameters which directly influence the data read quality and integrity.

Anyway, our developers add a new additional feature in the upcoming PC-3000 Flash 8.2.x software update which allows adding unknown memory chip automatically with 100% parameters matching result.

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Digital Forensics: PC-3000 SSD – how to bypass the TRIM

Posted on 06/28/2023 by ACELab team

Hey there!

In this article we are going to speak about the TRIM command which appears in the beginning of SSD era (around 14 years ago) and become a native feature in all existing Solid State Drives.

So, what is that and how’s it working?

TRIM – is an internal hardware SSD command which works in pair with Operating System. By default, TRIM was fully integrated in all OS starting from Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7 and MacOS X 10.6 (approximately from 2009-2010).

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Posted in Data Extractor | 26 Comments