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.

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Data Extractor, PC-3000 HDD | 4 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | 17 Comments

PC-3000 Flash. The Importance of having a powerful PC (UPDATED JAN 2026)

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”.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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?!

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Data Extractor, PC-3000 SSD | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

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, we 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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Data Extractor | Leave a comment

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).

Continue reading →

Posted in Data Extractor | 27 Comments

PC-3000. Best PC configuration for ACE Lab products in 2026

Posted on 02/03/2023 by ACELab team

Recently, users have been asking about the most comfortable hardware configuration for using PC-3000 Portable PRO, PC-3000 Flash, PC-3000 Express, PC-3000 UDMA-E. A lot of engineers are still working on computers with Core i5 4400 and 6-8GB of DDR3 RAM, but this configuration is outdated and if you want to recover huge NAND Flash cases with 64-512Gb capacity, or working with complicated RAID configuration, you should get faster Personal Computer. We decided to compile a short list of configurations of different price categories, which should be enough for any complicated case.

All modern CPU based on Intel 8-14GEN and the recent models of Core Ultra – are a really great option for working machine. At the same time, AMD Ryzen CPU starting from 3GEN are also a perfect CPU for making a good working stations. It’s recommend to use as many cores as you can get (like 8 and above), but pay attention to the CPU architecture – old Core i9 with 8 cores will be slower than newer Intel Core i5 with 6 physical cores. The best options will be provided below.

Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, Data Extractor, PC-3000 Flash, PC-3000 HDD, PC-3000 SSD | Tagged , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

PC-3000 HDD. How to fix the Second Level Translator (T2) in the PC-3000 7.2 Software Version

Posted on 12/22/2022 by ACELab team

Hello Friends! As you know, the Second Level Translator (T2) is a very critical FW part which affects HDD normal work and data access. Previously, if the T2 was damaged, we  had to use RAW recovery in PBA mode in order to get access to the files. In the PC-3000 Software Version 7.2.x, we can do more to recover the T2 and get data access. Let us review this new PC-3000 feature in the article below. Continue reading →

Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | 5 Comments