We found a SOMO report on working conditions in some factories related to the hard disk drive manufacturing.

Ants came in and ate the cooling gel on top of the chips inside this cd-rom. We saw three much worse cases, all with the Sony notebooks – probably Sony discovered some yummy recipe for the gel it is using?

The metal bars wrapped with masking tape (shown below the case) were put inside the case just to increase weight and make the adapter feel more “solid” in the hand.

There is one upside to the mindless TOT SMTP filtering: people will start switching to the secure SMTPS protocol if their hosting providers support it, which is a good thing – private information, like e-mail, should be encrypted in transmission by default. Details of the switching to alternative SMTP (or SMTPS) port can be found on our ADSL information page.

Probably the only power bar with acceptable quality sold in Phuket. It firmly holds various kinds of plugs. Can be found in the Home Pro, Lotus.

This is an example of a case when we cannot recover data. The platters (containing data) on this Toshiba notebook drive are made of glass, one of them was shattered on impact. Also the aluminium case of the drive was bent. It is actually possible (but very difficult) to extract fragments of files from the platter left intact.

Another successful data recovery from Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 with seized motor bearing. Recently we are having quite a few drives from 7200.8, 7200.9 series with this kind of failure. Toshiba notebook hard drives are also very prone to it.

Quite often we have to recover data from the drives in external USB enclosures when the hardware is OK, but the data (usually $MFT) is corrupted in a certain way, similar in many cases. We always wanted to know what exactly causes this corruption. Our primary suspect is a driver USBSTOR.SYS, possibly version 5.1.2600.2586. We welcome any comments from people who experienced problems with the USB storage devices under Windows XP and use this version of the driver.

With a lot of effort we managed to recover 100% of customer data from a drive what took a plunge (with the notebook) into the sea water and spent some time on the depth of 5 m.

Our data recovery customers from Phuket, Thailand and the rest of the world now can easily and securely browse the filesystem of their recovered drives online prior to payment.