How Does Hard Drive Firmware Become Corrupted?

Hard drive firmware is the embedded software that acts as the drive’s internal operating system. When the firmware becomes corrupted, the drive can become completely inaccessible, even if its physical components are otherwise healthy.Firmware corruption occurs due to sudden...
October 9, 2025

Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) Errors: Data Loss Symptoms

A “cyclic redundancy check” (CRC) error means that the data on your storage device is corrupt and unreadable. The device’s operating system performed a data-verification check and the result didn’t match what was expected, which means that the raw data...
October 8, 2025

Data Recovery Challenges: Simultaneous Head Crashes in RAID 10 Arrays

A simultaneous head crash across multiple drives in a RAID 10 array is a severe data loss scenario that requires immediate treatment in a professional data recovery laboratory.  In fact, multiple head crashes require a laboratory diagnosis — head crashes...
October 7, 2025

Data Carving: Data Recovery Techniques Explained

Data carving is an advanced data recovery technique that extracts files directly from the raw bits and bytes on a storage device. It’s an option when the storage device’s file system is missing, corrupt, or otherwise inaccessible.Ideally, data carving...
October 6, 2025

Enterprise vs. Consumer Hard Drives: Key Differences in Recovery

Enterprise and consumer-class hard drives are built for vastly different workloads. The average consumer probably won’t benefit from a HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) drive, for example, and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is overkill for most consumer applications — but...
October 3, 2025

Why You Shouldn’t Run CHKDSK on a Degraded RAID Volume

Running the Check Disk (CHKDSK) utility on a degraded RAID volume can cause catastrophic, irreversible data loss. If you’ve lost data from a RAID array, contact a professional data recovery provider as soon as possible — do not run CHKDSK...
October 2, 2025

What to Do When Your Business’s Only Accounting Drive Fails

When your business’s primary accounting drive fails, immediately power down the computer or server. Continued operation, even for a few minutes, can turn a recoverable situation into a permanent data loss, especially for mechanically failing hard drives or logically corrupt...
September 26, 2025

How to Securely Wipe a Hard Drive Before Selling or Recycling It

The most reliable way to securely wipe a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) is to perform a single-pass overwrite, which writes a pattern of zeros over the entire drive. That’s sufficient to make the original data unrecoverable by even the...
September 25, 2025

Should You Use the ATA Secure Erase Command on a USB SSD?

No, you should not rely on the ATA Secure Erase command to wipe a USB-connected solid-state drive (SSD). The ATA Secure Erase command is a powerful, built-in function for sanitizing internal drives, and it’s perfectly sufficient for sanitizing internal SSDs....
September 24, 2025

SSD vs. HDD Data Recovery: Key Differences and Techniques

While Datarecovery.com provides services for all digital storage devices, the vast majority of the cases we receive involve solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard disk drives (HDDs).  The prognosis for data recovery is strong for both device types, provided the work...
September 23, 2025