Data Recovery Blog

In this Dell PowerVault recovery case, the client came to us after their Hyper-V host machine had failed. The client’s IT technicians attempted a hard reboot of the server containing their Hyper-V datastores in an attempt to fix the problem. However, when the server came back online, it reported a troubling message. The server couldRead more

When a hard drive comes to our data recovery lab here at Gillware after spending some time in another data recovery company’s lab, it’s usually for one of two reasons. Commonly, the other data recovery company had charged the drive’s owner an amount of money for their services far in excess of what the dataRead more

When your computer freezes or crashes, it’s usually just a minor annoyance—although it can be a major frustration if you’ve gone a few hours without saving your work. But sometimes things go really wrong, and your computer won’t boot afterward. Sometimes, as in this data recovery case, the hard drive itself has failed. When thisRead more

In this Kingston SSD recovery case, the client had a 240 GB SSDNow solid state drive installed in their PC. One day, the drive would not show up in the user’s BIOS—the very first thing that starts up when you turn on your computer. Your motherboard doesn’t exactly have much in the way of data storage,Read more

In this case study, a small dental clinic had been using a single SAS Seagate hard drive to store their DentiMax dental records database. This enterprise-grade hard drive stored the X-ray images taken by the firm’s DentiMax CMOS sensors, along with electronic health records for the clinic’s patients. Needless to say, this was very importantRead more

SSDs come in a wide variety of form factors, since they have far fewer constraints on size and shape than traditional drives. This is great for manufacturers of tablets and thin notebooks, because it lets them pack usable amounts of storage in very small and thin spaces. A lot of SSDs on the market stick withRead more

This crashed server came to Gillware all the way from Spain. The client had an IBM Storwize V3700 server machine with eighteen enterprise-grade hard drives that had failed. They could try to mount the iSCSI targets on the server and, for a brief instant, see the data on their critical virtual machines. But they hadRead more

The Intel SSD 8MB bug began appearing in 2011, with Intel confirming the firmware bug’s “sightings” around August of that year. Since its first appearance, the 8MB bug has vexed countless SSD users. This bug affects Intel’s 320 Series SSDs. Not only would it make the SSD show up as unallocated—but to add insult toRead more

Fire and electronics rarely mix. Generally, fire is even more destructive than water is to electronics, mainly because while a lot of water-induced corrosion can be cleaned by a professional electrician, there’s nothing anyone can do about a charred, melted lump that used to be a circuit board. When a client brings a fire-damaged laptopRead more

Cats and dogs whine. Children whine (and some adults, too). And, as it turns out, even hard drives can whine sometimes. While a whining child can be placated (and in rare instances, a whining cat), a hard drive that is whining is far more intractable. If you have a whining hard drive, as the clientRead more