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.

Hmmm.

[vancondo]

The cost for recovering data from a drive with severe media damage, like mine, is about $1900. An average single drive data recovery costs about $1500.

Wouldn't backing your data up be cheaper?

--
http://vancouvercondo.info [vancouvercondo.info]

Re:Hmmm.

[Tenebrousedge]

Yeah, if you manage to do it pre-disaster. Afterwards, well, you learn an expensive lesson about doing backups.

How do you backup

[Anonymous Coward]

a slashdot advertorial?

DriveSavers

[DanWS6]

DriveSavers can save your dead drives so check out DriveSavers today and see their other link about DriveSavers and did I mention DriveSavers.

The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process.

Cool article, just wish it didn't read like an advertisement.

Just a Slash-Ad

[daniel23]

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.

Re:Hmmm.

[Slashdot Suxxors]

A properly scheduled and maintained backup system is truly a thing of beauty :)

That's the geekiest thing I've read today. ;)

Advertisments

[doomy]

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.

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 /. 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.

Re:This may be a dumb question...

[Shadow-isoHunt]

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.

Re:Hmmm.

[Lord Kano]

Wouldn't backing your data up be cheaper?

Absolutely, just like wearing a condom is cheaper than having a baby but sometimes don't take all necessary precautions.

LK

Re:Never had any luck with recovery

[sfbiker]

What's so hard to beleive? That it's possible to recover data from drives that have a physical or electrical problem?

So you think that the original article was a fabrication? Or maybe that Drivesavers took the guys $1500 and just ran r-tools to recover his data (and scrapped 20% of it just to make it look like it was hard)? What about Kroll Ontrack? Did they fleece NASA too with the Columbia disk recovery? Or maybe NASA made up the whole thing?

In spite of the article sounding like an advertisement (they probably offered the author a discount on his fee if he published his experience), I don't see anything extraordinary in the article that makes the data recovery hard to believe.

I've had one personal experience with data recover services -- it wasn't my drive, but I saw the dead drive, it would not even spin up though the green light on the circuit board was blinking.

They sent the drive to a recovery firm and $750 and 2 weeks later they got a DVD in the mail with the missing data and an explanation that the drive guts were fine, but the circuit board had some fault, so they just replaced the board (or maybe just some component) and were able to do a full recovery.

What the hell are the moderators doing ?

[ymenager]

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

Re:Their secret revealed...

[Snover]

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.

Wow, thanks for the ad

[rAiNsT0rm]

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.

Re:That's not an article, it's a long ad :(

[shawn(at)fsu]

I feel bad now for clicking on the "be sure to check out the museum link" at the bottom. Somewhere some jackoff is smiling at all the hits they are getting...
I hope I remember never to again read a story submitted by fields and most likely never read a story posted by kdawson

Re:This may be a dumb question...

[zippthorne]

I have two otherwise nearly identical Lexar Jumpdrives from between 6 and 8 years ago, one of which was purchased following the other one having spent some time in a pants pocket during which said pants were both washed and dried, and one of which is now pretty finnicky. But strangely, the good one is the one that went through the wash. If only I'd checked it before driving to Best Buy...

Re:Hmmm.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Backups aren't always possible. Say, collecting data, if you back up 1/day you still lose data. That can sometimes be worth the $2k.
Until you remember the existence of mirroring.

Re:Their secret revealed...

[mortonda]

I had a primary hard drive fail in a linux file server I have at the house. The backup hadn't been taken in a while (yeah, I got lazy), and I really needed the updated files.

Which is why backup solutions must be automatic

Re:Their secret revealed...

[Ihmhi]

The entire article reads like an advertisement for the company. This is pretty piss poor quality for a Slashdot article.

Re:Their secret revealed...

[nmos]

You're better off plugging directly into a computer rather than using an external USB/Firewire adapter. In my experience anyway those adapters tend to give up the first time you run into a bad sector but if you plug in directly you can use tools such as dd_rescue to keep trying until you've recovered every scrap of data possible.

Re:Nice Theory But...

[MadnessASAP]

Reminds me of how people are always amazed at the things you find in a nerds toolkit.

Re:Hmmm.

[value_added]

Backups aren't always possible. Say, collecting data, if you back up 1/day you still lose data. That can sometimes be worth the $2k. Until you remember the existence of mirroring.

And mirrored data that is accidently rm -rf, wrongly changed, or on drives that all fail, is worth how much?

Some sort of RAID is always a good idea, but that's a different subject. Put another way, backups are always possible. Or better yet, mirroring is not a substitute for backups.

Re:Hmmm.

[mgblst]

Depends on how many hdd you have, and how often they break. If they only break 1 in a 1000, then you may be better of just using this solution.

Of course, you aren't because there are other problems that backing up solve, but still..

Re:Important factor!

[mortonda]

I forgot the other important factor:

Backups must be tested