IBM Hard Drive & Server Data Recovery

IBM invented the hard disk drive and made drives for decades before selling the business to Hitachi in 2003. Today IBM drives are mainly found in its servers and storage systems, which use IBM-branded drives made by Seagate, HGST and Toshiba with IBM-specific firmware.

Data Retrieval Ltd recovers data from legacy IBM drives, IBM and Lenovo System x servers, IBM Power systems and IBM storage arrays, including arrays where several drives have failed.

IBM Systems and Drives We Recover

Range / family	Example models & notes
Legacy IBM drives	Deskstar 75GXP, 60GXP, 120GXP; Travelstar laptop drives; Ultrastar 36Z15, 73LZX; SCSI drives.
System x / xSeries	ServeRAID M-series RAID on System x3550, x3650 and later Lenovo ThinkSystem servers.
IBM Power / AIX	JFS and JFS2 file systems on Power servers – see UNIX recovery.
Storage arrays	DS3000/DS4000/DS5000, Storwize V3700/V5000/V7000 and FlashSystem arrays.
Tape	IBM 3590/3592 and IBM LTO drives – see tape recovery.

Common Scenarios

• Two or more failed drives in a RAID 5 array
• Controller failure or lost RAID configuration
• Failed rebuild after a drive was replaced
• Firmware faults on IBM-branded SAS drives
• Corrupted VMFS, NTFS, ReFS or JFS2 volumes

Before you send your device – five things to avoid

• Switch the device off and leave it off – every power cycle can make physical damage worse
• Do not run CHKDSK, Disk First Aid, fsck or recovery software on a drive that clicks, beeps or is slow
• Do not open the drive or swap the circuit board – modern boards hold drive-specific adaptive data
• Do not reinstall the operating system or initialise the disk when prompted
• Keep liquid-damaged devices unpowered and bring them in as quickly as possible