Data recovery on a Seagate Backup Plus Portable 2.5″ USB 3 external hard drive – January 2019

Over the last 2 years, Seagate released a new family of portable or laptop hard drives. They are known as the Rosewood family and are very different from the previous generation. The physical manufacturing process is different, the firmware is completely new. They are more difficult to work on compared to older hard drives and come with their own challenges. In terms of looks, they no longer have a standard top lid, instead it’s been replaced with a sticker that acts as the seal as well.

A client brought in one of these Seagate external hard drives which was no longer detecting on his computer. These Rosewood hard drives have an encrypted ROM and the firmware is locked down. Even the diagnostic port is locked. Luckily the specialist data recovery we have can work around this problem. Below you can see the drive model, serial number and capacity cannot be read as the drive cannot intialise due to the hardware problem. A list of errors is presented.

When these hard drives suffer from a lot of bad sectors, the firmware cannot handle the problem and the drive stops responding. The solution in some instances is to rebuild what is called the translator module. However, unlike older Seagate drives, you cannot work with the firmware as the manufacturer has disabled this. After some procedures with our specialist hardware we are able to backup key modules first and then regenerate this translator module, and then write back some vital original modules once complete, as seen below.

Once the firmware repairs have been done, the hard drive identifies and initialises correctly and we can begin to recover the data. Here you see the drive shows up correctly as a 2TB Seagate and the green sectors show data being recovered successfully. A lot of special hardware and knowledge is required to recover the data from these Seagate hard drives safely and successfully. If you have a faulty Seagate portable hard drive that needs repair or recovery, contact us for the best data recovery experience in Cape Town.