PC-3000 Flash. How to Recover Data from the NAND Flash Drives with the COB (Chip on Board) Memory Chips

Posted on 08/28/2020 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

The COB (Chip On Board) memory chips present a challenge to data recovery engineers trying to recover data from them. The main obstacles lie in their internal structure: under the coating of black plastic, there is just a NAND crystal with small traces connected to the PCB. The procedure of coating removal is very dangerous since you can easily damage the NAND core. And even if you succeed, it doesn’t mean that you can read data from such a chip.

So what can you do if a NAND Flash drive with the eMMC chip that has a disabled controller, the COB controller, or even the COB memory chip ends up on your desk? In this article, we will show you the unique way to handle these untypical but commonly encountered cases.

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PC-3000 Portable III. The Standalone Mode to Diagnose Drives, Create Sector-by-sector copies, and Erase Data Without a Host Computer

Posted on 08/12/2020 by ACELab team

Hello, guys!

As you well know, our new PC-3000 Portable III tool has a built-in screen and it’s own Operating System, which allows communicating with connected drives without a host PC!

In this article, we are going to find out what features of the Standalone Mode are available to the owners of the PC-3000 Portable III.

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PC-3000 Data Extractor. How to Merge a Sequence of Bin Files into One Image File

Posted on 07/22/2020 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

Let’s imagine the following situation:

After you have finished recovering data, you get only a sequence of binary files which contains recovered raw data that were deleted or corrupted (e.g. task.prm, map.bin, and other files related to the task settings). Or, say, you have used some other tool for data imaging and got some sequence of binary data files as well.

What to do with this? Let’s find it out in our new article


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Posted in Articles, Data Extractor | 4 Comments

PC-3000 SAS. How to Change Sector size and Edit Power-on Hours.

Posted on 07/08/2020 by ACELab team

Hello Friends!

Some SAS drives have a limitation in their FW: they work for some time (Power-on Hours value written inside of FW), but when the time is over, the drive stops working no matter its condition. Also, some NAS systems can require a special sector size: 512/520/528 bytes per sector. These issues can be successfully solved with the PC-3000 SAS, beginning with ver. 6.7.12, if a drive is supported. So, let’s see how to deal with that.

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PC-3000 Flash. A One-Click Solution – Now in the Transformation Graph!

Posted on 07/01/2020 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

Did you ever struggle with applying a solution from the PC-3000 Flash Solution Center? With the new “Execute (graph)” function, you can apply a solution and automatically create a transformation graph with all actions that had already been done. And it greatly facilitates your work with the PC-3000 Flash!

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PC-3000 SAS. How to Сhange FW, Model, and Vendor with the “Download microcode” Feature.

Posted on 06/25/2020 by ACELab team

Hello Friends!

As we know, SAS drives are mostly used in special NAS systems. These server systems are configured to work with particular special drives, and if any SAS drive gets damaged, the NAS system will not work with another HDD. This issue can be solved (for supported SAS drives) by changing the vendor ID with the PC-3000 SAS, starting from ver. 6.7.12. Let’s see how to deal with that!

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PC-3000 Flash. 7 Steps to Recover Data from Kingston DataTravel G4 64GB with the CBM2199a Controller

Posted on 06/15/2020 by ACELab team

Hello everyone!

In 2019 and 2020 the manufacturers of the NAND Flash controllers actively renewed their old lines with new generations. Silicon Motion released the SM3281L controller, Alcor Micro – AU89102. Now the Chipsbank company presented a new CBM2199a controller which replaced the old CBM209x family.

The new CBM2199a controller uses a Static XOR pattern instead of a Dynamic XOR. In theory, this should mean that such a controller is easier to work with compared to the previous CBM2098 generation. But it’s not that simple!

The ACE Lab developers have done a tremendous job with the XOR extraction to bring in the support of this new controller from Chipsbank. Below, you will find the complete guide on how to extract data from the CBM2199a-based drives with the PC-3000 Flash on the example of Kingston DataTravel G4 64GB.

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PC-3000 for HDD. How to Solve the Device Fault State (DWF) Issue

Posted on 06/05/2020 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

Today we want to discuss another feature implemented with the new PC-3000 Software Ver. 6.7. – the solution to the Device Fault issue. Sometimes, you can get it right after power on. Sometimes, your drive may come into a Ready state, but any action will result in the DWF register and your command will be aborted.

The good thing is the Terminal should still work, so we can get access to data.

This solution has already been shown on the ACE Lab Online TechCon 2020 and might be useful for those of you who work with Seagate drives every day. At the end of the article, you can also watch the video of the full process.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD, Video | 2 Comments

PC-3000 Flash. How to Recover Data from NAND Flash Drives with the Newest AU89102DF Controller

Posted on 06/02/2020 by ACELab team

The PC-3000 Flash supports the biggest variety of damaged NAND Flash controllers from different manufacturers, including one of the oldest – Alcor Micro. For the last 15 years, this company has developed a huge number of different modifications of USB Stick CPUs. It had started the business from simple but very popular AU6980 and now it has conquered the entire market of Flash USB drives with its famous AU6989/AU6998 family.

Not that long ago Alcor Micro released a new controller with extremely complex internal data scrambling – AU89102DF. It becomes more and more popular, especially in the segment of USB Flash drives with a very high capacity (128 GB and above). The PC-3000 Flash is keeping up with the controllers’ manufacturers, so the latest software update allows you to recover data from the storage media based on this new controller! Read the article below, to learn more about how to do it.

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WD SMR. How to Unlock Palmer SATA PCB and Use It For Future Unlocks.

Posted on 05/22/2020 by ACELab team

Hello Friends!

Every day we face more and more SMR Palmer drives. All of them are SED locked, and when the Service Area modules are damaged, or data is not available, we must use a special unlocked SATA PCB in order to get FW access and fix it.

The easiest way is to buy such a PCB directly from China, however, the price of such unlocked PCB is pretty high. Moreover, sometimes the unlocked PCB can become inoperable due to the wrong soldering process or too many ROM rewrites. Is it necessary to buy the new expensive one? Let’s discuss this in the article below.

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Posted in Articles, PC-3000 HDD | 5 Comments