Blog
December 5th 2008
All names in this first hand account have been omitted or changed to protect the parties involved.
All right, I will begin this story from the beginning. It was a Tuesday morning here in the Computer Based Associates office. I was busy working on decoding a drive for a customer. Suddenly, a man I have never met barges through the door. He looked very pale and worried,” looks like someone is already having a bad day,” I thought. “ I need you guys to recover this drive it is an emergency,” he told me with a shaky voice. Here in our office we always say if a customer calls in first and then comes in, they probably need are services. If a customer rushes to our office and shows up without calling, they are desperate for our services. This case was the latter.
He tells me that this drive has data for a major company that he was doing a project for. I wont name the company but I can say without a doubt it is one of the top ten biggest companies in the United States. He told me him and his team were working onsite and someone tripped over the power cable to the drive and caused the drive to hit the ground while running. On a side note we always say in data recovery that if a drive falls while it’s shut off its bad. If a drive falls while it’s running it’s almost always a total loss.
This guy originally found another data recovery company and sent it halfway around the country. That company held the drive for months asking for extra money every few weeks. After almost three months of this, he decides to get his drive back and send it somewhere else. This is what brings this man into our office.
So I have him fill out our customer information sheet and I begin to diagnose the drive. This was one of the most difficult cases we have ever had. The drive was a donor, because the first data recovery company did not return the original drive. This means that we don’t know if they put the platters in the wrong drive casing or if it even has the original platter inside. We also don’t know if the platter shifted causing the servo timing to be misaligned. If platters move just a millionth of an inch, it will be impossible to recover anything because the drive wont know which way is up.
The drive did not respond to any of our software here so I knew that the drive had to be rebuilt. I ordered a matching donor drive and waited for it to arrive. Once it arrived at our office, I immediately went into the clean room. This drives capacity was 500 gigabytes. If you know anything about data recovery then you know that the 500-gigabyte drive is notorious for failing and extremely difficult to repair. This is because it has so many platters and heads. All these heads and platters are very close together and just a slight flinch could destroy any chance of recovery. I took me about five hours to rebuild the donor drive.
At this point the drive could still not be read. The drive was running without clicking but could still not be mounted on to any operating system. I realized that the firmware on the drive had become corrupt so I proceeded to reprogram the firmware. This took about two weeks of trial and error programming till I got the drive to be recognized by windows XP. I transferred out the data and called the happy customer to tell him his data was fully recovered. The moral of the story is only use external drives powered through USB.