Recovering files from damaged noname recorder

[antoniusvl 0]

Dear CCTV Experts,

 

I have been reading trough topics on this forum all day long. I am a sysadmin at a medium company in the Netherlands.

Last evening we had a break in and a lot of expensive equipment has been stolen. One thing they didn't manage to steal was the recording unit. Instead they damaged the device, the main motherboard has a crack in it.

I took the HDD from the device and connected it to my pc with a usb to sata cable, it still spins up without any issues. I did a smart test and it also passed without errors. However the hdd is not recognized.

 

I tried a few things i saw on the internet including connecting it to a linux system (live cd) and i ran some recovery tools, none of it worked.

The recorder itself is a noname recorder, it has 16 channels and was bought online by my boss a few years ago. The seller is no longer active.

I looked at the mainboard but didn't find any text i could search for online.

 

What's the best way to proceed? Any sugestions are apreciated

[Securame 0]

I am curious, but how did they manage to damage the DVR and crack the main board, but were not able to steal the DVR or steal the hard drive?

 

Focus on recognising the DVR, manufacturer, model, etc, you need that information to know on what format it stores data on the hard drive. Pictures of the unit might help, front cover, back, bottom, main board, any stickers it may have.

[antoniusvl 0]

I can't disclose the details, but the way the system was mounted they had limited access to the device.

 

It's a simple black box with no writing on it, we used to access it trough the browser.

At the back it has 16 bnc connectors. No HDMI of VGA.

The drive inside is a Hitachi 2TB drive.

[ssnapier 0]

First off I would use SpinRite to ensure the drive is good to go. I would then use some sort of partition manager to see if you can determine what type of formatting was used with it. Once you know that you should be able to find a way to mount the drive and gain access to the data.

 

SpinRite can be found here... it is weird looking, but trust me it is the best hard drive analysis and recovery tool on the market. https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

[antoniusvl 0]

Sorry i never followed up on this one.

 

I ran spinrite but it didn't find any errors. I also ran hdd regenerator, and it found a few delays but nothing more.

 

We ended up contacting a specialized company and they recovered the images for us.

The burglars were visible, but they were also very aware of the location of the camera's and avoided them. We were not able to get a usable image of them.

 

But i can highly recommend the company that helped us (Recorder-Recovery.nl). They were professional and we had the images on a USB-Drive within 48 hours.

 

Thanks again for all the help.

 

Btw. We ended up replacing our complete cctv installation with a IP based one. We are currently using a Synology NAS with Surveillance station.