External Enclosure: :Seagate Freeagent GoFlex Desk

Hard drive: ST1000DL002

Firmware: CC98

We received in this Seagate Freeagent GoFlex desk drive that the client says was not recognised on the computer and that it had to be formatted which they did not want to do as the data was important. The external case had been opened and someone had already had a look at the drive. 

Once we received the drive into our offices, we backed up the firmware and inspected the drive. 

On starting up the drive, it would cease to read, and the drive would stop all access to any sectors. We went into the firmware and repaired the issue with the firmware and that gave us access to the drive so that it did not seize each time we tried to read it.

Once we were able to see the drive, we found that the Master File Table (MFT) was quite damaged and was filled with bad sectors. We managed to read some of the bad sectors and rebuild the directory structure to what it once was using the file records and the index records. Once this was done, we recovered all the data on the drive except those that had damaged file records.

More than 95% of the data was recovered, and written to new media. 

The client was very happy.