What is the difference between physical and logical sectors and why some sector is read via PC-3000 utility but not read via DE ?

Posted on 02/02/2017 by ACELab team

Some of our users don’t understand what this confirmation screen means when starting a task in Data Extractor or even can make false conclusions. Specially for them we wrote this article 🙂

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How to read ROM via programmer device

Posted on 01/30/2017 by ACELab team

Sometimes you can’t read ROM via PC3000 due to PCB damage. In some situation you need to unsolder the chip and use programmer device to read ROM content.

In this tutorial we will show how to do it.

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PC-3000 on Macbook. A “small” guide how to make your own Apple-based portable workstation

Posted on 01/18/2017 by ACELab team

A lot of ACE Lab customers from Europe and North America region ask us about possibility to install PC-3000 Flash or PC-3000 Portable on their MAC computers. These laptops provide good performance, they are quite light-weight, and finally – they are pretty good in all respects, starting from the screen and aluminium case, and ending with the quality and speed of hardware part.

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But as you all know, PC-3000 does not support MAC OS system, and if you want to use our professional tools for Data Recovery, you will need to use only Windows NT family of Operation Systems:

  • Windows XP (32/64 bit)
  • Windows Vista (32/64 bit)
  • Windows 7 (32/64 bit)
  • Windows 8 (32/64 bit)
  • Windows 8.1 (32/64 bit)
  • Windows 10 (32/64 bit)

But as we said before, it’s really inconvenient for some of our customers, and instead of using PC-3000 on their MacBooks, they should buy another laptop based on Windows only for PC-3000 installation.

Of course, everyone can use Apple BootCamp to create a new partition on internal Macbook drive, but we can say that it’s not a good idea. First of all, there’s a free space problem. The most typical models of Apple laptops have limited space on their internal SSD – like 128-512GB. And after Windows installation, usually you have only a couple of gigabytes for the task creation, which is definitely not enough for a normal working process.

In this article we are going to describe another way, how you can make your MacBook to be compatible with PC-3000 products! Ready? Here we go!

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 Flash, PC-3000 HDD | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

PC-3000 for HDD. Seagate F3. Practical cases. How to get the Service Area access if one of non-system heads is damaged.

Posted on 01/18/2017 by ACELab team

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Hello Friends! Sometimes we get the Seagate F3 drives which are clicking and don’t read the Service Area at all initially. It can be because of bad head(s), damaged/not original  PCB and ROM, and bad Service Area modules.

In this article we  review the situation when we need to get the Service Area access to edit the HDD ID, do a backup of SA and possibly make the data readable by good heads.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | Tagged | 18 Comments

PC-3000 DE. Data Extractor RAID Edition. How to recover data from RAID 5 on 3 drives where one drive has outdated data (we don’t know which one)

Posted on 01/13/2017 by ACELab team

Hello friends,

Data recovery can be simple when we know RAID configuration (level, block size, start of striping, delay) and all RAID members have valid data (user data without any modifications).

Unfortunately, we often find ourselves in less than perfect circumstances, when we don’t know RAID configuration and are not sure that data on RAID members is still actual.

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Data Extractor RAID Edition manages the situation. Let us show you an elegant solution for one simple example.

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PC-3000 HDD. Nontypical HDD recovery. iPod Video

Posted on 01/10/2017 by ACELab team

There are lot of nontypical devices like media stations, different recorders, cameras, audio players, etc which are based on nontypical drives.

Here is a real case of hard drive (!!!) from iPod Video 30 Gb.

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Such players (5th generation) was released in October of 2005.

Here we go…

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

PC-3000 Flash. Monolith pinout determination guide. Variant 2

Posted on 12/29/2016 by ACELab team

This familiarization article doesn’t contain nuances of technical procedure and can’t cover ends and outs of pinout determination. So if you don’t have practice in monolith soldering then we advise to play for safety and don’t start it. This process is very difficult for newcomers without practice in soldering or in working with digital analyser.

Also, before starting, please read this article.

This guidance is about how to determine pinout using cheap analyser. In this case we use Hanteck LA5034  with 34 channels and 64 Kbit memory depth. This memory is very small but is enough for our task if apply rigour to process.

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The following things are required for this procedure:

  1. A logical analyser;
  2. A healthy monolith connected to logical analyser on one side and a test monolith connected via a card-reader or USB depending on the type of monolith on the other;
  3. ONFI specification

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PC-3000 Flash. Image building with Block Number

Posted on 12/23/2016 by ACELab team

Nowadays exist a lot of different controllers which are using different types of markes in SA for sorting all blocks together. As everybody knows, sometimes we can use information about marker and build image with full folder structure if we will sort all blocks together, using information about order of blocks.

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A look back on RAID Recovery training sessions in the new ACE Lab training class

Posted on 12/21/2016 by ACELab team

The data recovery training class has been occupied since the first day ACE Lab opened the doors of the new office in Prague. Ten training sessions have been held so far, and more to come. As it is the biggest vendor-provided data recovery training venue, 12 people can learn cutting-edge technologies at the same time. The facility is a perfect venue for all types of data recovery training, covering HDD, RAID, SSD, NAND Flash, Monolith, Mobile, Chip-off training sessions, etc.

Over 25 people took part in the RAID Data Recovery Advanced Training sessions during one week between Nov 16-23, which were held right after the Grand Opening. Here’s a sneak peek at how it all looked and the impressions some of the trainees shared:

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PC-3000 for HDD. Seagate F3. How to fix Init SMART Fail error

Posted on 12/19/2016 by ACELab team

Hi Friends!

How are you today?

As you know SMART is very useful thing. It provides detailed infomation about Hard Drive. However SMART is broken too.

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Do you see this error?

Init SMART Fail
LED:000000CC FAddr:xxxxxxxx

If yes then welcome under the cut 🙂

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments