Disk recovery?

Tue Oct 29 00:24:55 PST 2002

On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 09:54:14PM -0600, jhoney at flash.net wrote:
> David Alban wrote:
> 
> >
> >   Does anybody here know a decent drive recovery place where they can do
> >   a little discovery (first) and some recovery (possibly later) on
> >   either or both of these drives?
> >   
> >   Big TIA for any personal experiences :)

> Fortunately I haven't had any experience with them but a few weeks ago I 
> sent a Seagate and a Western Digital drive back for warranty exchange. 
> One of the sites (I'm thinking Seagate) has a list of recommended 
> recovery services.  Drill into the path you'd take to return a drive or 
> RMA status.
> 
> Good luck.

 My experience with Maxtor drives is that I *really* like their warranty
 policy.

 If the drive is still in manufacturer they will replace, no questions
 asked.  The only caveat is that you have to request an RMA code (duh)
 and you *must* pack it to them the way they say.  no bubble wrap, no
 staticky peanuts.

 If t's no longer in manufacture, but you can prove you bought it within 
 the last 90 days... well, that'd be when you need the receipt, but
 other than that things are just the same.

 And the make it quite easy to look up if your drive model qualifies.

 . . .

 Ahh, but they were wondering about data recovery, itself.  I have no
 direct experience of dealing directly with cleanroom recovery shops.

 Indirect experience offers that both Symantec and McAfee offered up
 Ontrack Data Recovery as a recommendation if someone's drive was that
 far gone.  And nobody ever claimed it was cheap. 

 Direct experience, then...

 There is a known form of dd that will brutally make a few seek tricks to 
 try and beat its way past crudded out disk drive portions.  Look for it 
 on some of the "security and forensics" type linux mini-distros.

 If a drive won't talk at all sometimes it's merely that the partition
 table is screwed up that bad;  the data *may* be okay.  If track 0 
 isn't headcrashed, you can narrow down the correct sizes, one partition
 at a time.  Slow, but rewarding, if hardware itself isn't what did you
 in.

 Once upon forever ago (about 93, 94) Jim and I both have done data
 recovery ourselves;  trained by the best at Norton.  But that was 
 all software-style, no cleanroom excitement.  And neither of us have
 rushed to learn about the gore under the hood of modern operating 
 systems.  Although, of course, it's pretty easy to have a well 
 behaved system at hand for comparison.   Still, verry ugggggly...

 I'd saying if you can find the beginnings of things, you pretty much 
 win;  lost+found items, or CHKDSK.00N fragments, can be identified 
 using 'file' from a well-equipped rescue disk. 

Good luck.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
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