IBM Data Recovery Information

IBM(later Hitachi) is widely known in data recovery business for their line of DeskStar HDDs also known as DeathStars. These hard drives, mostly DTLA and AVER families, became infamous for their reportedly high failure rates. It is believed their problems were mainly connected with glass platters - new technology introduced by IBM in these hard drives. After some time magnetic layer started to fall off the platters creating dust inside the HDA(Head Disk Assembly) that led to massive head crashes and large number of bad sectors making the data inaccessible. Apart from this IBM used soldering alloy of poor quality and had deficient PCB layout that caused looseness in contacts between the PCB and HDA that in turn led to firmware corruption and bad sectors as well. If you happen to hear that unmistakable repeating scratching noise from your drive(click to listen) this is exactly your case. It's critical at this point to stop any manipulations with the hard drive and send it for evaluation to our lab. Any further attempts to read these areas would shorten the drive's life and may result in further unrecoverable data loss.

Another common data loss problem for all IBM-Hitachi hard drives is burnt components on the cirquit board(PCB). Hard drives are very vulnerable to power surges and bad power supply unit combined with power streak is usually enough to burn spindle driver chip on the PCB. If this occurs the computer would reboot itself, you would normally notice acrid smoke coming from your PC and upon power on the drive would not spin up at all.
If this is the case you can try PCB swap from another IBM drive of the same model but the chances of successful data recovery are really slim. Moreover, newer drives can sometimes "lock" incompatible PCB and after that PCB won't be able to work with its native hard drive resulting in further data loss. The fact is that most modern drives have special parameters in the ROM chip on the PCB called adaptives which are unique for this particular drive and these parameters should correspond to the HDA PCB was manufactured with. In our lab we are able to read ROM and NVRAM contents even from burnt logic boards and write it to the compatible donor board. After that donor PCB becomes fully compatible with the damaged drive and often data can be recovered after that. Unfortunately in about 50% cases it is still not enough as power surge could strike not only the PCB but also preamplifier chip located on the head stack inside the HDA. In this case the only way to retrieve data would be opening the drive in the clean room and swapping the head stack.

Below is the list of models manufactured by IBM. Click on yours to see if there are any special remarks about it. If you can't find your model in the list there is still a great chance we can handle it. Just fill out evaluation form or contact us.