Slashdot Mirror
A Walk Through the Hard Drive Recovery Process
Fields writes "It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered, but few people actually use a recovery service because they're expensive and not always successful. Even fewer people ever get any insights into the process, as recovery companies are secretive about their methods and rarely reveal any more information that is necessary for billing. Geek.com has an article walking through a drive recovery handled by DriveSavers. The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process. From the article, "'[M]y drive failed in about every way you can imagine. It had electro-mechanical failure resulting in severe media damage. Seagate considered it dead, but I didn't give up. It's actually pretty amazing that they were able to recover nearly all of the data. Of course, they had to do some rebuilding, but that's what you expect when you send it to the ER for hard drives.'" Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters, too.
Wouldn't backing your data up be cheaper?
--
http://vancouvercondo.info
-
The summary says Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters too. and I did. It is pure advertising. Zero facts, instead boring emotional angle with mom and pop hugging as all their iMac data got recovered.
That stuff on the front page? Bahh! Instead of 15 modpoints twice a week give me 5 article mod points to vote this one down to -1 overrated.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
IME flash drives don't fail catastrophically, they go bad one part at a time, and generally only writes fail, you can still read without problem. I've seen a few drives fail all together, but they stopped registering as USB devices all together. The same recovery techniques can be used, and they need not be expensive. There's MagicRescue, and foremost that kick absolute ass. Free recovery software rawks.
www.isoHunt.com
This article is such a blatant fake / advertisement, how could the moderators let that be published on the front page ?
As noted by many, no real technical information. Whoever wrote it might have tried to sound 'grassroot', but the whole thing still reads very much like a marketing material... 'Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters too' ? Especially when such page contains nothing but marketing stuff ? Give me a break !
And how many people would go pay 2000$ just to get back some music and photos of the family ???
Slashdot needs a system so that people can RATE THE MODERATORS, because anyone who lets something such blatant fake-grassroot marketing material on the front-page should not be in that position.
The whole thing is just an insult to our intelligence
All modern disks ship with some unused spare sectors that are used to remap onto failed sectors. This occurs all inside the drive's firmware, so even though the computer thinks it's addressing the same sector, in actuality the drive is pulling data from the remapped spare. The firmware is smart enough to only remap sectors when you try to write to a bad one, though, because if it decided to remap a bad sector that had data on it that you needed, you'd not be able to get back that data even if the disk was eventually able to read the sector.
[insert witty comment here]
The entire article reads like an advertisement for the company. This is pretty piss poor quality for a Slashdot article.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)