Data Recovery & Backup Solutions for Western

Before reading this, disconnect your faulty hard drive now. Further use can cause more damage.

We understand how important your data is and in most cases we can recovery your lost/deleted files - even if you have formatted your hard drive.

Do you backup your data? If not, we can provide you with a backup solution.

If you heard your hard drive making a ticking noise, you have a hardware issue (disconnect your hard drive right away), which is costly to fix - but in most cases we can recovery your data.

Data recovery is not an IT job. It is a forensic job.

There are only a few locations that have the required expensive equipment (i.e. class 100 cleanroom and specialised imager): Large companies based in the cities such as Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin and Hobart that are very expensive (due to large overheads), and companies like us with a small team of talent individuals with a wealth of experience and knowledge.

Data Recovery & Backup Solutions for Western are a small team of highly skilled engineers that are based on the Gold Coast, so our prices can not be beaten. Please be cautious of general computer repair shops offering data recovery services, since they generally just download a data recovery software program to recover the data, which is only good for software issues. Most data recovery issues are electronic or mechanical issues, so using a software data recovery program, will just cause more issues with the drive, and therefore increase the difficulty/cost of recovering your data.

For more information, please see our about us page.

1. IC Logic Board PCB
2. Motor/Spindle
3. Physical Heads
4. Heads Movement
5. Actuator
6. Actuator Arm
7. Platters
8. Protective Cover
9. Chassis
10. Firmware Examination
11. Image Repair Drive

• Level 1 - Logical: No physical damage, Logical minor file system corruption as a result of a possible windows update, user error or possible virus.
• Level 2 - Mechanical/Logical: Disk with up to 1% of bad sectors and a corrupted file system as a result of the bad sectors.
• Level 3 - Mechanical/Logical: Disk with up to 5% of bad sectors and a corrupted file system as a result of the bad sectors.
• Level 4 - Mechanical/Logical: Disk with up to 10% of bad sectors and a corrupted file system as a result of the bad sectors. Or a disk without bad sectors but with a massive logical corruption of the file system and possibly overwritten data, etc.
• Level 5 - Firmware/Mechanical/Electronic: Disk with corrupted firmware modules and with at least 1% of bad sectors and a corrupted file system as a result of the bad sectors. Or a disk without physical damage but with disk encryption applied and underlying file system corruption. This level also covers electronic faults of the board PCB.
• Level 6 - Physical/Mechanical/Firmware: clean room job for physically damaged drive with either R/W heads stiction condition, or with at least one faulty R/W in the stack. In most of the cases these drives will also show bad sectors and possibly firmware corruption and file system corruption.
• Level 7 - Physical/Mechanical/Firmware: clean room job, damaged R/W heads stack or damaged R/W Pre-amp without obvious magnetic platters damage. These jobs will be defined as recovery attempts and will require rebuilding the drive in a clean room from donor parts. Only after rebuilding the drive we will be able to assess if the data will be recoverable or not. In most of the cases these drives will also show bad sectors and possibly firmware corruption and file system corruption.
• Level 8 - Physical/Mechanical/Firmware: clean room job, damaged R/W heads stack or damaged R/W Pre-amp with obvious magnetic platters damage. These jobs will be defined as top complexity recovery attempts and will require rebuilding the drive in a clean room from donor parts. Only after rebuilding the drive we will be able to assess if the data will be recoverable or not – the success rate in these type of cases will be lower because of the magnetic platters damage. In most of the cases these drives will also show bad sectors and possibly firmware corruption and file system corruption. In some of the cases only partial recovery may be possible.
• Not Recoverable: drives with excessive magnetic platters damage – usually carved rings and highly contaminated drive chamber as a result of the carved black particles. With current technology these type of jobs are beyond recovery.

The hard drive recovery process is very complex and requires a lot of specialized data recovery engineering tools and knowledge, and level 6+ failures require a class 100 cleanroom.