HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi Friends,

some weeks ago we've got a Laptop with Kingston A400 SSD. We could recover all data with some reading errors/loss of readiness. After our offer customer decided against the recovery and went to an other company (i think any repair shop).

Few days ago the customer came back because they couldn't recover the data. Now the drive id's as "SATAFIRM S11". I can read 95% of the drive, 5% reading errors, many loss of readyness.

But all sectors are empty (00) - no userdata at all. Is this fixable with PC3K SSD (as i read here in other threads) or did the other company try to repair the firmware and destroyed the data (as i suggest)?

Best regards,
Boerge

PS: Firmware on the label is SBFK71E0 - Firmware in PC3K is SBFK71W0

I think i'm right but i wan't to be sure.

Sounds very much like they tried to update the FW and it got screwed.

Unfortunately it sounds like a combination of “penny-pinching” from the client (as they thought they could save a few Euros by shipping around blindly, but then presumably being prepared to pay your fees for a proper job) and over confidence in the skills of the “engineer” at the PC shop, resulting in data loss

pcimage wrote:Unfortunately it sounds like a combination of “penny-pinching” from the client (as they thought they could save a few Euros by shipping around blindly, but then presumably being prepared to pay your fees for a proper job) and over confidence in the skills of the “engineer” at the PC shop, resulting in data loss :-(

Perhaps the client wasn't prepared to accept the first quote s/he was given? After all, data recovery isn't cheap, certainly not "pennies" or "a few Euros". I don't know about you, but I generally obtain at least two quotes for any job, be it data recovery or anything else. And there is nothing to say that the client didn't go to another data recovery shop rather than a "PC shop". In fact I can probably find 100 threads involving screw-ups by DR "engineers" in this forum alone.

Hi Boerge, It's a firmware issue where the translator is lost (could be weak hands with bad blocks in SA as well)...so you need to re-create that translator.
I working on the exact same case right now, and almost getting all the data from the drive.

boerge wrote:I think i'm right but i wan't to be sure.

Why do you care?

Scenario was like this: first time when you have this SSD, controller still works (translator too), there was just only bad blocks and you can read this drive generally without big problem.
After it back to you, you see drive ID: SATAFIRM S11. It means that translator stops work normally and to read drive you need rebuild it (for example with PC3K SSD). But data still can be retrieved. Of course it will be more expensive for client, and result could be worse - it depends on condition of memory chip (sometimes degradation of memory modules is big).