Flash ROM corruption of 25P05AVG chip

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Data Recovery from disk drives with a corrupt 25P05AVG chip

Introduction: The 25P05AVG is a 512k flash ROM chip often used in hard disk drives. Located on the controller board, it commonly contains a portion of the service area data that is used to boot and calibrate the drive.

Data Recovery: We have seen several hard drives where the contents of this chip have become corrupt. When this occurs access to the hard drive is lost. The following failure symptoms will also be noticed:

The drive will not longer be recognised in the BIOS when the machine is powered on
The hard drive will make a ticking noise. (The behaviour is similar to the drive having head problems, but the cause is the corrupt chip - the heads are fine)

To recover the data it is necessary to remove the corruption in the ROM. The drive will then be correctly recognised and the data be accessible.

Data Clinic are often able to fully recover data from hard disk drives suffering from a data corruption of the 25P05AVG chip. Please contact us for further details.

Links:

> A similar problem found on Deskstar hard drives (NV-RAM corruption)
> MAIN data recovery section
> MAIN laptop data recovery section

Please note that all modern hard disk drives are manufactured to very high standards, fail infrequently and have very similar rates of reliability.

momentus flash rom chip location
Above: Seagate Momentus controller board showing the location of the 25P05AVG flash ROM chip

Above: 25P05AVG flash ROM chip