Will Ascenzo
Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.
HDD Failure: Getting a Second Opinion
Hard disk drives, like everything else, eventually stop working. No matter how well you care for your computer’s internal hard drive or your external hard drive, sooner or later it will kick the bucket. In general, hard drives have a…
RAID Array Recovery Case Study: When a Blessing Becomes a Curse
Our client in this RAID array recovery case came from a medical clinic. One of the computers in their lab responsible for storing DICOM standard images of patient X-rays used a RAID-1 mirrored array to store data. A RAID-1 array…
Mac OS X Uninstall and Downgrade
If you’ve been following our case study blog posts, you’ve probably noticed that we publish a lot of case studies about recovering data from Windows computers. That’s not an indictment of your PC’s quality or propensity for failure. Windows PCs,…
WD My Passport Hard Disk Not Accessible
The client in this data recovery case had a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive. The drive had been working fine, and they’d filled it with home videos and family photos—your usual irreplaceable stuff. Then one day, as the…
Deleted Photo Recovery Case Study: How We Recover Lost Files
The client in this data recovery case came to us after 34 gigabytes of photos had been deleted from their laptop. Once they had realized the amount of data they’d lost, they removed the solid state drive from the computer…
Recovering Missing AJA Video Footage
AJA’s Ki Pro video recorder looks familiar to anybody who remembers the halcyon days when we recorded audio and video on magnetic tape. But instead of storing data on tape, the Ki Pro opts for the much more modern hard…
NTFS Data Recovery: Windows 10 Downgrade Problems
After trying out Windows 10, plenty of people ultimately chose to back out and return to their old OS. It’s not hard to see why—early adopters have run into all sorts of issues over the past year and a half,…
Server Crash Recovery Case Study: Lightning Strikes Twice
The client in this data recovery came to us after their local fire department suffered a server crash. A lightning strike to the station had led to a power surge. Afterward, the little two-drive server the department relied on to…
Laptop Data Recovery: Disk Not Initialized
The client in this data recovery case came to us after their laptop PC ran into trouble booting. After removing the hard drive and plugging it into a friend’s PC, the drive showed up as “not initialized” in Windows Disk…