Data Recovery for the Rest of Us?

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?"

Comments

A Backup Tape, A Backup Tape, My Kingdom For...

[Anonymous Coward]

Total hard disk crash - O pestilence!
Now is the winter of our disk contents!

Helpful alternatives

[man_ls]

If you want to reconsider a professional data recovery choice, try Drivesavers. I've seen them in various computer publications and they seem to be pretty honest, but I have never used their services so I'm not sure.

Searching C|Net Downloads I found Recover98 which seems to be the best package there. It costs $169 to register, which provides access to all features, and support for Windows 2000 dynamic drives(Software RAID arrays), NTFS 5, and it's really small. Again, I haven't tested it, but it looks decent. The trial has save features partly disabled but you can at least see if it looks good, and it is certainly cheaper than a professional data recovery service.

I haven't had the (mis?)fortune of using an IBM hard drive since my 12.5GB one in an older system of mine. Are there any thoughts of a class-action lawsuit based on the drives' failure to perform properly? If new drives are failing this often, there is a definate problem.

JKoebel

Re:Helpful alternatives

[KyleCordes]

There are several data recovery companies, although when the firm I was at needed data recovery a few years ago, I helped shop around and got the feeling that they were reselling each others' services. There might only actually be one :-)

There were able to recover most of the data from a nonfunctional drive. The cost was thousands of dollars.

Naturally, this was followed by an greatly increased willingless to spend thousands more on backup systems...

EasyRestore by PowerQuest

[Tumbleweed]

http://www.powerquest.com/easyrestore/

For those of us without scads of disposable income

[unitron]

Has anyone out there done it with Debug or Norton's Disk Editor? I have a drive with scrambled partition tables that I used a recovery program on and then discovered it might have been Chernobyl infected so now it's worse than when I started and it looks like I'm going to have to copy to another drive in small handfuls of bytes at a time. Any helpful suggestions, dire warnings, etc.?

Re:For those of us without scads of disposable inc

[unitron]

Thanks for the reply. Fortunately the whole drive is Fat16 and I only really need to recover one 1 Gig partition, but I'm currently out of the labor market due to family stuff so I've got more time than money, so looks like I'd better start learning to think in hex.

I think part of the problem was running a second primary partition at the end of the drive and leaving it unhidden.

A few tricks

[pete-classic]

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

Who backs up all 80 gigs?

[Wakko Warner]

I've got about 300 gigs (soon 700) on my network. Most of that is MP3s and (soon) SHNs. This stuff has all been burnt to CD long in the past, so it's safe, so I don't bother to back it up.

That having been said, get yourself a DDS-2, DDS-3, or DLT drive next time. Back up as much of the important stuff as you can. I'm pretty sure you'll run out of "important" stuff before you run out of even a DDS-2 tape. It's awfully hard for me to find 4 gigs of stuff I absolutely can't live without on my machine.

Good luck in your recovery efforts; hopefully in the future, if you get a decent tape drive, you won't need to worry about it so much.

- A.P.

Re:Who backs up all 80 gigs?

[Telek]

It's awfully hard for me to find 4 gigs of stuff I absolutely can't live without on my machine.

Why bother with a dat tape? They're bloody expensive. And I have a hard time finding 700MB of stuff that I absolutely can't live without (all source code backups, ICQ and email for the past 5 years, and personal documents easily fit in under 100MB).

But it's about all those 300GB of MP3s that you have that you want backed up, and it's not very practical to do that onto CD.

That's why I'm just buying extra drives and mirroring the set. No problems then. It's extremely unlikely that I'll have a dual failure at the same time, so I'm not too worried.

Re:Who backs up all 80 gigs?

[Wakko Warner]

Why bother with a dat tape? They're bloody expensive.

Huh? DDS-1 tapes can hold 2/4GB and are about $3. A DDS-2 tape is well under $10 and can be used hundreds of times before you have to toss it. DLT tapes are rated for thousands of passes and cost about $30. So, you either spend (20 cents * 2000) = 400 dollars on CD-Rs, or 30 bucks on a DLT tape...

- A.P.

Re:Who backs up all 80 gigs?

[Telek]

Huh? DDS-1 tapes can hold 2/4GB and are about $3.

And how much is the drive?

IIRC a lot more than the $120 that you can get a decent CDR for.

Re:Who backs up all 80 gigs?

[Telek]

If I spend $250 for a DLT2000XT drive (which I did)

Cool! Where'd you get it! Cuz I would love to back up all of my data, but using a pile of CDRs isn't appealing.

Recurring vs. fixed costs.

Mind you, I bought 10 CDRWs and thus have 7GB to back up all of my important data on that I don't have to spend more money on. I still find that solution cheaper than yours, if a little less convenient. The nice thing with the CDRWs is that they can be read in anyone's computers.

Re:Who backs up all 80 gigs?

[Wakko Warner]

Check eBay. I got mine there from a reputable seller last year. They've dropped in price about 30-50 percent since I bought mine, it would seem.

Fish-tank "clean" room?

[cr0sh]

While I find it hard to imagine someone actually doing this, the idea of building a fishtank-style clean-room and actually using it for this sort of operation does appeal to me.

I can imagine doing it completely off-the-shelf, by building a working envelope with plexiglas and silicone sealant, hooking up two over-large dish gloves (or surgical gloves) with extended cuffs for mobility, and a HEPA filtration system providing a positive pressure feed. Most of the components could be purchased at Walmart.

Actually using it would be interesting for crazy operations like you outline - last resort efforts of the Nth kind. Makes me wonder if any person or group has actually done such a thing...

You have a chance...

[cymen]

Are you 100% positive they are 100% dead? A lot of people with the 75 GXP problem found they could get their data off by powering back up the drive. Some ran the IBM utility... Usually it went like this - 1) crash/lots of loud noises, 2) copy data off asap, 3) curse IBM.

Re:For those of us without scads of disposable inc

[Telek]

I've done a pile of this stuff, drop me a line if you want some more help.

Re:might help

[unitron]

Are you sure the drive wasn't assaulted by the RIAA MP3 assassin ninja hackers?

Ontrack

[BRTB]

Right when I read the article about IBM 75GXP hard drives crashing, my nice new 60GXP 60gb drive(supposedly the newer model - faster and without the problems) decided to start creating bad sectors right in the middle of whatever NTFS5 calls its FAT. Win2k decided it didn't see the partition anymore, and kept asking "Drive D is unformatted. Would you like to format it now?" Scary part is, I had my big Comp-Sci project on there, and a DDS-2 drive was in its box waiting for me to install it.

So I brought the drive into work and ran Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro on it overnight. Somehow it was able to analyze, recover and copy every file on the drive, even those which were written on top of supposedly bad sectors. Unfortunately, EasyRecovery Pro isn't cheap ($500), but it works great.

I still can't get that DDS-2 drive (an ARCHIVE Python something-or-other) to work though, Win2k sees the drive but won't recognize the new tapes I'm feeding it.