Author Archives: Joep

And now I’m done with Steve Gibson (and SpinRite)

Is SpinRite a scam? Is S.G. a charlatan? People have accused Steve Gibson of being a charlatan and his SpinRite software of being little more than a scam. As you may or may not know S.G. is working on an update for the SpinRite DOS software, SpinRite 6.1. This has been a process that has… Read More »

Drives returning bogus data on failed reads

Some examples of drives returning bogus data after failed reads. Among data recovery engineers these are referred to as “mold” or “edu” sectors and they’re most likely parts of the drive’s S.A. or system area. Anyway, they have nothing to do with the original data from the failed sector.

Can you detect a drive was trimmed by reading it?

Different flash operations (read / write / erase) have different power requirements. This is probably due to fact that an erase operation requires 4 times the voltage, about 20v, than what a read operation requires, about 5v. So idea is that power consumption gives clues about what a flash drive is doing. I am assuming the… Read More »

Decoding Status from NVMe SMART logs

I noticed this question a lot (on SuperUser for example) and I wondered about it myself too. Questions like: Decyphering NVMe SMART error root@truenas[~]# smartctl -l error /dev/nvme4 smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE-p12 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === Error Information (NVMe… Read More »

Seagate RAW SMART Attributes to Error Converter

Convert Seagate SMART RAW values for attributes: 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 7 Seek_Error_Rate 195 ECC_On_the_Fly_Count to actual errors. These values are known to display huge numbers, often leading to unnecessary worries or even panic. The RAW values however represent both an event count and the number of errors: IOW how many reads and how many errors during… Read More »

A write protected SSD (NVMe, read-only) ..

A SSD drive becoming read-only or write protected is a fairly common issue. Many online guides bypass diagnostics and immediately unleash a number of possible solutions which commonly involve registry edits, chkdsk, Disk Management, Disk Part and erasing the drive. In the situation we’re looking at today, these solutions will prove useless. SSD drives can… Read More »

Recover .BRAW (Blackmagic RAW video) files

This is a small tale about how a relatively ‘obscure’ and rare file format can be close to unrecoverable using existing tools. To refresh our minds we can basically recover files in two ways: File system based. This is always the preferred method as the file system allows us to determine the precise location of… Read More »

USB flash drive freezing – Optimal setup for disk imaging

About this post This is quick write up about observations during recovery of an ‘unstable’ USB flash drive (pendrive, USB stick). This also in response to messages I pick up in various forums, where people struggle seeing how DeepSpar’s USB Stabilizer can help them improve disk imaging – while they do see how it’s a… Read More »