Slashdot Mirror
Data Recovery from Jaz Disks
mach-5 writes "I recently had an Iomega Jaz disk fragged by the drive (the data is corrupt from simply using the disk in another drive). I know that I can easily get a free (beer) replacement from Iomega, but what I really want is my data back, which is far from free. This is a little unfair considering their drive corrupted my disk. Has anyone had any success in having their data recovered by a drive company. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this particular company?"
I had dozens of bad hard drives over the last 10 years, but never heard about free data recovery. I think by using the hard drive, you accept the risk it might go bad and be replaced with a blank one. The same is probably true for any media (tape, jaz, floppy, zip)... But then, IANAL...
If your data is that important, make backups (i.e. more than one)
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
I'd take the drive and be grateful it was offered. Most companies wouldn't do that much for you.
If the data was that important, you should have been backing up. Maybe that sounds trite, but it's true. You've learned a leason. I hope you can rebuild/replace the data that was lost.
The Jaz cartidge *was* the backup. Oops!!!!
I bought one of the jaz drives and three 1GB carts when they first came out with them. Biggest waste of hard-earned money I ever blew on hardware.
GRC makes a very nice piece of software called Spinrite. I have used this in the past to recover tonns of data. I have not used the newer versions but if it anywhere near as good as the old version it would be worth a try.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
I've found this to be an effective option when dealing with Iomega. Be sure to follow these instructions exactly.
On a level surface, place your feet, about shoulder width apart. Place the Jaz disk on the floor between your feet.
With your hands on your knees, slowly bend over. SLOWLY! Ok.
When you get your head as far as it can go between your legs, pucker up and kiss your own ass.
After you're done, look at the Jaz disk, gurgle up a bit of phlegm, and spit on it. Repeat as often as necessary.
No sig is worth reading.
I know it's been said a thousand times...
CDR's are pennies each
A second, 100GB HD is about $120
Tape backups are slow but cheap
I know it can be a pain, buf if you have ANYTHING of importance, back it up!
On a side note, how much work/data/$$$ do you think are lost to data loss, from drives getting smoked to accidently deleting files?
That drive contains moving parts. Moving parts fail. Unless gross negligence on the part of Iomega resulted in your data failure, I think you're not likely to get them to pay for the data. Furthermore, since the data was stored on a medium for which their is an expected failure rate (yes, they even publish when it is expected failure), I think they would argue you should have had the data backed up.
Good luck. But you should have been aware of potential failures in hard drives of all sorts, removable or not. I don't think you're likely to get very far on this one.
--Be human.
Well, mach-5, I hate to add another negative voice to the chorus, but yeah, the disk is fsck'ed. If you can't fsck it with the standard commercial recovery packages, you are also fsck'ed. But the first thing you hear when you get a warm body on the other end of the Iomega Hotline will be, "we'll replace the media, but we can't be responsible for the data."
And as unkind as it may sound, they're right. Check your documentation, it says it right there. the drive can grind it's happy little heads through your magnum opus, negating all those thousands of hours of grad-school, and all you're going to get out of Iomega is a new disk. That's the way it is, and that's the way it always will be. Every piece of mass-storage equipment in my house and office has a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) which is a fanciful metric that tells you how often you can expect said piece of HW to go tits-up and die. Iomega knows that their storage solutions have these limitations, and they inform you of this up front, with that MTBF rating.
Jaz drives are great for backups, but you can't expect them to last forever, and you're a fool if you think that Murphy's law isn't hiding around the corner looking to fubar your day.
You cannot expect Iomega to take responsibility for every cartridge they produce, no matter what conditions it is exposed to. It is not Iomega's job to ensure that they can recovery everything that is every put onto those spinning platters. I do not know of any company that has that kind of a guarantee, and I'd be very wary of a company that promised it could. Entropy will always increase, and 3am hardware failure can deliver more entropy than you can shake a stick at.
None of this does you any good in your present position, but just like any other emotional tradgedy, there are steps and goals to help you with coping. Don't hate Iomega, how old was that disk, how much use had it gotten? Was it something you re-wrote over every evening to transfer stuff from work to home? Unless it died right out of the box (right on the leading edge of the bathtub-curve) you got at least some measure of use out of it, and Iomega succeded in delivering a product that worked. I know people who have used the same Jaz cartridge for 5+ years, millions of cycles, without incident. Others have had bad media that went south in a week.
Iomega is not to blame for the statistical blip that you were on the receiving end of, and there is almost nothing they can do for you at this point. I'm not trying to push responsibility onto you for the failure, but you can't really blame Iomega, and they are not going to eat the recovery cost for the data.
And that brings us to the next step, recovering your data. This is something you're going to have to pay for out of your own pocket, and you probably want to analyize your options before you start writing checks. There are several companies that do drive recovery and have a 'free-evaluation' process. You ship them the drive, they tell you how much cash to cough up to recovery it. This gives you an option to decided if all that pr0n is really worth $4000 of your student loan money. I would suggest talking to someplace like Accurate Data Recovery, Flat Rate Data Recovery or some other place that isn't liable to hand you a $3000+ bill for pulling the data. note: I have no experience or interest in these companys. YMMV, do your homework, google.com is your friend.
All else fails, rip off the housing, drill a hole in the platter and nail it to the wall in your data center. This may act as a gruesome deterent to the other equipment in the room and keep them in line. Good luck.
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
nope
I had a series of bad Jaz drives (not disks). I got fed up and wanted a refund, for all hardware, including disks I had bought. I phoned the president or CEO (don't remember which) left a moderately brief voicemail summarizing my problems, and finally got action. Normal channels (support email and phone) produced absolutely nothing.
This was during a period of bad press for Iomega (remember Click of Death?) so maybe they were being more responsive than usual.
Everyone who I've ever heard from who has used DriveSavers has been delighted. Their Hall of Fame is pretty fun too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this particular company?
Yeah, ask 'em for a Ditto drive instead. That way, you'll at least _know_ it's an unreliable piece of shit.
--saint
Seriously. Consider this a lesson. If you do it again, we'll have to smack you around.
If it's important to you, back it up. It doesn't matter how you do it: a rdist to another machine every night, a stack of floppies, CD-Rs, another Jaz disk, printouts, or getting it included in the next Information Society single as 150 baud line noise. The three key words: back it up. You're fully free to blame whoever you want, but, if it was important, it was up to you, and nobody else, to make sure it didn't get destroyed.
Life sucks. Next time, back it up.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Tape drives are anything but cheap, in all my research.
What did your research consist of? Were you pricing only things larger than this? I've bought $250 tape drives that suit my backup needs perfectly. (Or are you slashdot-poor and is $250 too much to spend?)
Drives cost a lot for anything semi-reliable, and once you've got this drive, it probably won't backup a single hard drive on one tape.
Forgive me for being arrogant, but you are not so important that your most prized data cannot fit onto a single CD-R. I have a 15/30GB DLT drive and I can't even fill a single tape on it; I've started backing up unimportant data just because I have the space! There's absolutely no way you need to back up an entire 160 gig hard drive, and, if you do, any decent backup program (even tar, which isn't a decent backup program) can span tapes.
Tape drives used to be practical when you could do a compleet system backup on a tape, but that basicaly isn't possible anymore.
Sure it is. Not every system has 2 terabytes of 100%-used space, especially not someone's crappy home desktop.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Which then fails as he copies the files..
jaz drives suck. i'm sure most everyone that has ..
used one for any good period of time knows that. I got my first jaz drive in 97 or 98, by mid 99 I had
stopped using it, after having it replaced once(out of warranty), and had replaced another 2GB jaz(company's) and about 10 jaz disks. I even had 1 jaz drive that killed every disk I put in the drive. I have yet to find a good backup medium other then the expensive DLT tape. Generic tape is slow and unreliable, CD-R I have had trouble with reading in various drives over the years(many brands of media, many brands of CDR drives, many software programs), secondary hard disks, is really what I am doing now, I have about 200GB of storage shared on my home network, so if a drive starts to fail I can copy to a network share. Hopefully I'll get around to buying a DLT4000 soon
I've had a ZIP drive for about 7 years now. Only had one disk go bad on me and im not sure that i was good to beign with. I only have 15 or so that isnt too bad.
Backup medias are a tricky thing. CDs are great they last but are small.
Harddives are great too but tend to get slightly expensive depending on how much you have to back up, if i was to back up i would have prolyl 20+ gigs of data to save. and i can hardly justify spending 60 for a harddisk that will only hold what i need to back up now. and im sure i will have to back more up later.
Tapes well again with cost. Drive=XXX Media=XXX per-pop.
Most Users would prolly be ok Just burning documents and etc... to a CD now and then. I recently backed up all my digital pictures to a CD (~300Megs-o-Data). And some website stuff to ZIP disk(~@20Megs-o-data)... Maybe a combination of backup medias is best for some. Can update the ZIP as often as nessary. and the pics when there are a signifigant number of new ones.
Maybe the jaz drive *was* the backup? And he just lost his backups? It could happen. (Though your analysis is probably right.)
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Now I've seen it all!
Appended to the end of comments I post? 120 chars?!
Then just do a:
dd if=/dev/sg?? bs=1024 | strings | lpr
This will both recover what data it can, and back it up to a stable medium all at the same time.
But remember, dd can be both your best friend and your worst enemy. Sit on your hands and read the full command before hitting enter. It can suck to plaster your english essay over the boot sector of your hardrive.
It can suck to plaster your english essay over the boot sector of your hardrive.
This is exactly what I did once. Well, it wasn't an English essay, but close enough. I had to use the drive manufacturer's low-level format utility just to make it useable again. Of course, that effectively fragged the disk. Thankfully, nothing important or irreplaceable.
My boss laughed for a week.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
1) Dont' use scandisk. It'll destroy.
;-)
2) Don't use defrag. Same problem.
3) http://grc.com/intro.htm
Try using spinrite - there's a chance the data can be recovered with that.
Failing that, get Dolly - it's used to clone partitions. Clone it to a HD and then start looking at repair options.
It's possible, its time intensive, and it's a royal pain- I hope you know what is on that disk because, otherwise, it's goign to be nearly impossible.
Oh, and remember to have fun
Assuming you don't have a backup, there is no guarantee you will be able to recover ANYTHING. However, here is what you can try:
1: Make a physical copy of the disk (or an image) using diskcopy, dd, or something similar. I would further copy this copy so as to avoid further damage to possibly damaged media.
2: Try to recover the filesystem on the duplicate image using conventional tools. If that does not work or further corrupts the information.
3: If unsuccessful, use another copy and try running it through file recovery tools (The Coroners' Toolkit contains a utility called Lazarus which may help to recover at least part of your files for UNIX and similar tools exist on Windows). Read the docs before you begin, because of the potential for further damage.
Happy hunting!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
A year or two ago I got a refurbed generation 1 2G Jaz drive from PCConnection for about $130 (yeah, I know, the folly of buying a drive that crapped out on someone else...). But it was replacing a drive that had died on me the year before, leaving me with about 20GB of useless cartridges that cost about $100 apiece. Anyway, the drive showed up in the mail and didn't work. PCConnection made me deal with Iomega directly.
Iomega was actually quite helpful as long as I put up with all of the handholding and troubleshooting steps they read of their scripts before telling them what the problem was. They sent me a replacement - another refurbed drive. If worked - for 3 days, then died. I also found out that the first drive munged one of my carts. Another call, they sent me another drive. This one worked for a week and then died. I now had 2 bad carts (killed by their drives) and I had gone through three refurbed drives. I tried to remain calm, explaining how it was not acceptable for them to keep eating my carts by sending me defective drives.
The told me they could not offer any data recovery services, and that I used the old carts at my own risk. However, to make up for my trouble, they sent me a brand new drive and brand new carts to replace the ones that got eaten.
Not an ideal situation, but to their credit, they did make a decent attempt to do right by me, and for my $130 and a bit of hassle, I got myself a $300 drive and another $300 worth of new carts. This was a pretty good experience compared to the horror stories of Iomega customer service back in the early days of Zip disks.
-Jeff
I'm sorry to have to be the one to say it, but in the immortal words of Nelson: "hah hah!"
I have seen countless jazz drives and disks go bad over the years, both the 1 and 2 Gb versions. Makes me all the much more merrier that I didn't buy one and instead opted for CDRs.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....