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Data Recovery for the Rest of Us?

Posted by Cliff on from the rescuing-critical-data dept.

Filly-O-Fish asks: "By ironic coincidence, the day the IBM Deskstar Failures story was posted, both my 40 gig 75GXP drives failed. Whilst I don't have the cure for cancer on there, I do have some personal data that I'd really like to try to recover. No way could I afford to have it recovered by a professional data recovery company. I looked at a few software packages, the most promising one being ACR Mediatools, the demo version available only shows you your lost files though, you have to register($499) to actually recover them. Yes, I realize I should have backed them up regularly.. but I haven't had time to back 80 gigs up to CDR, and I can't afford one of these babies. Are there any alternative cheap(!)/free solutions to get my data back?"

1 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. A few tricks by pete-classic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There is no really cheap way to go, but . . .

    You might get a little more luck if you put the drive in the freezer for a while first (not sure what the IBM problem is). If it is heat related this will buy you a bit of useful time.

    If you have some access to the drive but the filesystem is trashed, you can get a lot of data with dd. (This months sysadmin has an article on /file/ recovery, and some of the techniques would be applicable here.)

    Finally, drives are made of parts, and you might be able to replace the bad part. This is pretty easy if it is the drive logic. (a few screws and maybe a little solder)

    If it is anything except the platters themselves you can swap the platters with a good drive. (Replacing the heads, which are the most likely culprit.) The big downside here is that you have to trash a good drive (of the EXACT same type) to do this. The resulting drive is NOT to be trusted, or you will find yourself in the same position again very soon (hours or days), since you probably don't have a clean room handy to do the swap. (I suddenly think of "The Manhattan Project" when that HS kid is handling the weapons-grade plutonium with a fish tank and some rubber gloves.)

    Good luck (you're gonna need it).

    -Peter