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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.
A hard drive shaped freezer.
"It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered"
[Citation Needed]
Wouldn't backing your data up be cheaper?
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http://vancouvercondo.info
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...but are flash drives prone to the same sort of catastrophic failures disc drives are? And are the same recovery techniques workable with both? My gut tells me it's not nearly that simple.
a slashdot advertorial?
In my professional career, I've sent around 10 drives out for recovery, (various companies) and none of them were able to be successfully recovered. I think that most of these companies use some variation of R-Tools so that they can quote amazing statistics on their websites. (Over 99% of all data is recoverable!)
Sure, I suppose if the drive has bad electronics AND the head hasn't crashed, you might have some luck, but I never seem to get any of those cases. As far as people accidentally formatting their drives or deleting files, I can recover that stuff myself.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Having read the article, I can't help but think that it doesn't really read like an article of "Oh, this happened, and then this happened" especially considering that it is about hard driver recovery.
:(
Short of "sending in a zip lock satchel" and "using methodology" what exactly did this article cover in regards to recovering hard drive information? Not a lot. Sorry to be a bit of a drag here, but considering that the company was mentioned more than once, with links and so forth, it just made the whole thing read like a glorified infomercial with the added bonus of being surrounded by advertising.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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.
I'm sorry, but that was the most content-free load I've read on /. in a while. And no, I'm not new here - I just usually don't RTFA. ;-P
Video of the talk:
Defcon 14 - Hard Drive Recovery
Basically it talks about making a clean box and how to change out the read heads or the PCB from a drive that is the exact same model. Really cool stuff!
Recovering hard drives is a 3 step process:
1) Mumbo Jumbo
2) Put drive platter into otherwise identical drive
3) proprietary secret stuff (sound like they used Windows to get the data off and then burn to DVDs.
Now you don't have to read the article.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Are there any *REAL* guides out there that will show you how it's done through purchasing hardware from a store? It'd be nice to be able to do this all yourself if you have the right tools...
Well I for one now know what Driver Savers is (since I RTFA), but the whole thing lacks details. A story in /. should have more details than a glorified advertisement for a hard disk recovery job. There is a company down the street from me that does similar work for NASA and thus I don't think this is a unique field that no one on /. has ever heard of.
/. worthy if you (submitter) bought an identical harddisk and tried to swap platters etc and tried the recovery on your own. I've seen people do this and it's not hard to recover data even if you have physical damage on the drive.
Here is what I'd like to see (to submitter), maybe you should have gone to the corp with your drive (since you did spend 2k on recovery.. why not fly over?). Then you should have taken pictures of the whole process and even a video (instead of using stock images), and most of all you could have avoided all this by using backups.
But this story would have been truly
I've done a few platter swaps and have had good luck if I can find the right donor drive. So far I've gotten data off most of the disks I've tried but sometimes the recovery rate can be as low as 25%.
I recommend that people buy drives in pairs. That way you have a good drive to use as parts once the data has been moved off to a newer drive.
I do repairs in my house so there isn't a clean room in sight.
If the board is fried, a board swap tends to do the trick but the bad sectors are stored on the board so the mapping will result in some bad data.
I start with the hard drive in the freezer (using a external firewire case) trick first. That tends to get noisy bearings about 3 hours which is enough to copy data over.
If that doesn't work, I do a platter swap. I disassemble the drive and I've found that normal printer paper works great for lifting out the platters with out scratching them. Just make sure you put them in the donor drive in the same order and don't flip them. Once the platters are in, it appears that the drives have a few days to live before they stop working. With head crashes, you might want to consider only putting the good platters in. I have yet to find a good cleaning solution so with crashes you have a very limited amount of time but head crashes seem to be rare these days.
Once you can read the disk, use DD to copy the data to a new disk. Don't try to mount it to look for a specific file unless you only need one file and mount it read only. For data file recovery, I use a mac program Data Rescue by Prosoft which is good except it sometimes is too good and pulls out the internals like pictures out of flash and office docs.
If your going to do this at home, take apart a few older disks first. Keep in mind they designed these things to be assembled quickly so there is a way to retract the heads completely off the platter so hunt around for it. There are some people who use vacuum cleaners to try to remove dust and others will use a shower to steam up a bathroom and wait until the steam clears with the hope of taking the dust away. I just open the drives on my computer desk.
A little light on content as others mentioned :(
:( One head crashes and causes a chain reaction after the aluminum shavings clog the filters or interfer with the others. Luckily the software forced you to backup on the removeable platter each day. Only loss was a couple software mods (that the writer had a copy of) cause the system platter backup was kinda old, had to added back in.
:)
Nothing as interesting as the crash on our old mini-computer ages ago either. One of those 12" drives with 4-5 platters had a head crash and repurposed itself into a metal lathe quick nicely one weekend. At least it didnt burn down the building but it left several pounds of aluminum confetti all over the computer room after it blew out the filters on the drive. It seems you just can't filter air by the pound
Needless to say, that had a zero chance of recovery. Only time a insanely overpriced maintainence agreement ever paid off...Drive was almost $20k to replace plus cleanup and setup on 200lb drive.
Only other one that might have required a recovery service turned out to be electronic issue only and i sacificed a matching computer for the HD circuit board to repair the 'server' from a remote warehouse. Only some memos and spreadsheets and stuff and not worth the huge quote for recovery so i got to try it and fixed it the next day
PS. always found it interesting the the edge speed was the same as current drives at around 105mph. The head hit a platter going between 50 and 105 mph.
This article is such a blatant fake / advertisement, how could the moderators let that be published on the front page ?
As noted by many, no real technical information. Whoever wrote it might have tried to sound 'grassroot', but the whole thing still reads very much like a marketing material... 'Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters too' ? Especially when such page contains nothing but marketing stuff ? Give me a break !
And how many people would go pay 2000$ 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
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
... much like this article.
.. err .. mechanical and electrical? You mean the reciprocator was caught in the optical refraction? Now that's worth $1500.
Yep. The article helpfully points out the $1500 charge for a medium sized hard drive. It might have been more interesting if the article demonstrated a time when it wasn't 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.
So, just like this article? Got it. Something involving putting old platters into new drives by people wearing bio-hazard suits.
The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process.
Wowsers. You can say that again, but insights? I defy anyone to name any insight that wasn't in their last press release
[M]y drive failed in about every way you can imagine. It had electro-mechanical failure resulting in severe media damage.
Doesn't "elctro-mechanical failure" describe anything that could be wrong with a device that is
It's a good thing space on the interwebs is free. Someone should run this past the kids that edit airline magazines.
I actually use a number of drive recovery companies, and thanks to this slashvertisement I will never use this company nor will I read Geeks.com
The sad part is that I rarely even read Slashdot anymore since it is a sad shell of what it was... Pitiful.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
That is a nice theory but there is no oil in the bearings of a Hitachi (formerly IBM) drive. They ride on an air bearing. I have heard of faulty temperature sensors being reset through the freezing method, but whatever the reason I have seen the freezing method suggested by several sources. For me I believe that it has to do with moving the drive. Shorts or binds will often be resolved by moving the drive around.
When I worked for IBM I did a fair share of data recovery. My favorite drive that I saved was a laptop drive with a stiction problem. It would get caught during spin-up. I put my ear to the drive and would listen to it and kept rebooting and shaking the drive until it finally got past the rough spot. Recovered all the engineers data who was extremely happy he didn't have to waste $500 bucks with Ontrack.
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So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
I found an unusually large proportion of the follow up comments here to be (+1, Informative) and (+1, Interesting). TFA itself was total infomercial-tastic tripe, however.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I don't think Class 100 really qualifies as "ultra-cool" in the clean-room world, but it *does* however have a certain cachet of inconvenience as far as having to take a non-trivial amount of time to get into the bunny suit, walk across the 50 feet of sticky mats, through the air showers and into the actual clean-room area only to discover *then* that you have to take a leak. I've had it happen more than once.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Look at the normal ceiling tiles and door that aren't air tight. Even the small (3 employee) company I work for has a better clean room than that. Their outfits were just for show.
I've disassembled crashed drives (ceased) to temporarily free the platters. Aside from removing the platter (so they could get to more then 25% of the data, WTF?) it didn't really read like they actually did much. Maybe part of the reason that they are all smoke-and-mirrors about the work (some proprietary software, you mean like something they paid for?) is that when you get right down to it the work *most* of these shops do simply isn't rocket science.
Quack, quack.
I forgot the other important factor:
Backups must be tested