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Anyone taken a hard drive apart?

Preferred User

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I think there was a thread on this a while ago. But I'm not doing this myself. Too risky.

Client made a big mistake and ignored all my attempts to start a backup program. Yesterday it was nothing but blue screen errors. Opened it up, put my fingers on the hard drive and could feel something clicking inside there....got to be heads colliding with something.

Her "entire work life" was on that drive. It's at Ontrack Data Recovery right now. It will be somewhere between $700 and $2,300 to open it up and get as much as possible off the drive.

I hear these clean room guys can do amazing things. We'll see.
 

mindido

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Preferred,

I just love it when stuff like that happens. Hopefully, she NOW knows there is a reason why people back stuff up. I'll ALWAYS remember when that finally got through my thick skull.

Anyway, I put this in another thread a while back and have been using it off and on for a while now. Its called Cobian Backup and seems to work pretty well. You can find it here (its free):

http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

Now all you have to do is sell her an external HD.
 

Cman

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If anyone opened the drive in a "normal" room, you can forget about it. Especially if they touched anything.

That sort of thing is extremely specialized. If a regular tech is a GP, then HD recovery is the computer equivalent of being a heart surgeon lol.

It depends on how much the stuff is worth to the person, but I wouldn't even think about doing it myself (not that i would know how to begin with)
 

Preferred User

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Cman you wouldn't believe what guys try to do themselves. But I think when it's someone else's data you can't be as experimental. She says she'll pay whatever it takes, so we're going to Ontrack's clean room.

Min, she lost all her Outlook data last summer. Long story, but it involved synching with a phone. She didn't want to pay me to come set it up (I always put a copy of the .pst on the desktop before I do any synching), but paid me for two hours of trying to get it back. Now she's using the little batch file I made to back up her .pst to a flash drive every day. Will this get her to the alter on her server backups? Who knows. She's not a dummy at all. She's just stubborn about taking precautions when it comes to tech stuff.

I'll be interested to see what the clean room boys can harvest.
 

mindido

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Preferred,

Well, I guess some people just never learn. Hopefully, if she winds up paying $2 grand to get the info back, she'll finally learn.

You really should take a look at that app I suggested. It seems to be pretty much tailor made for people like her. It can be set up to do the backup automatically and, apparently, has the ability to only backup files that are new or have changed.

Worth a look.
 

Preferred User

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mindido said:
Preferred,

You really should take a look at that app I suggested.

Worth a look.

Took a look. I see it does FTP transfer. So is there any reason I couldn't just set it up to upload to one of those cheap GoDaddy hosting accounts? I don't think she needs more than 100 meg of storage. I'm a big believer in off-site backup.
 

mindido

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Preferred,

I haven't tried that, I'm just having it back up to an external HD, but I would think that it wouldn't have a problem with that.

I think that for someone like her (someone that just seems to forget to backup), this would probably work well if:

1. She has broadband
2. During install, allow the app to run at startup

Then the app basically takes care of itself. I allowed the app in the system tray for a while but didn't really like it that way. But, for someone like her, thats probably the way to go. Her stuff will get backed up in spite of her.
 

Preferred User

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mindido said:
I think that for someone like her (someone that just seems to forget to backup), this would probably work well if:

1. She has broadband
2. During install, allow the app to run at startup

Then the app basically takes care of itself. I allowed the app in the system tray for a while but didn't really like it that way. But, for someone like her, thats probably the way to go. Her stuff will get backed up in spite of her.

She's got a slow DSL. I'm guessing the upload on it is 200, real world. Might be best to go across the office every night, then make her burn a CD to take home once a week.

I'm like you, the less in my sys tray the better. She does need some hand holding though.
 

mindido

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Preferred User said:
Might be best to go across the office every night, then make her burn a CD to take home once a week.

If she only has to worry about 100 MB then your probably right. But I'd at least talk to her about an external HD. Pretty cheap nowadays, easy to use and can be toted anywhere easily and quickly.

Preferred User said:
She does need some hand holding though.

Thats why I think that app would be good for her. Once its set up, there really doesn't seem to be much to it. One thing I noticed when I had the app in the sys tray is that when I turned the external on the backup app would immediately start backing everything up. Pretty handy. And for someone like her, it may save her another $2 grand.
 

Dmoney

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That's some risky shit. It has never (AND I MEAN NEVER) crossed my mind to try and open a hardrive. The moment you open it in a normal room, it's toast, period.
 

mindido

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Dmoney said:
It has never (AND I MEAN NEVER) crossed my mind to try and open a hardrive.

Jeez, then how do you expect to learn? I've opened them up (years ago) to see whats inside and how they work, but I realized that it would probably never work again. As long as you realize that, and its a drive thats useless anyway, why not open it up?
 

Preferred User

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I've seen web sites where guys swear they can get data off of them if they put 'em in a plastic bag and freeze them. Sounds like treating cancer with leaches to me.

As for my client's drive, I got an email from Ontrack. They say it's in the clean room and "it will not image", whatever the H that means. They ordered some parts for it. I'm assuming the "parts" is a new circuit board? I dunno. My hard drive expertise is pretty limited.
 

Cman

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Imaging is basically just like it says it is. They take a snap shot of everything that is on the drive and can replicate it onto a new drive.

Its used sometimes in large scale operations where you have to set up a bunch of computers at once and don't want to spend a year doing separate installs. Its also used in recovery obviously.

A good program to use for this is Norton Ghost and the XP Systerm Restore is another example.

There are a ton of "parts" in a hard drive, so it could be anything. Probably one of the read/write heads or the arm or something.
 

mindido

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Preferred User said:
They say it's in the clean room and "it will not image", whatever the H that means.

Preferred,

CMan is correct in that imaging, for a company that operates many machines, is a good way to reset a machine back to a specified place. For example. A few years ago I was teaching software apps at a large insurance company. During the class the students were expected to make all kinds of changes to the file structure, files and a myriad of other things. When the class was done, the first thing that I had to do was run Ghost to put the machine back to a pre student condition so that the next class could perform the same, or similar, exercises.

I don't think imaging is real practical for the average user but its a godsend for a large company with many machines. The only real problem I remember with the images we used was that the IT dept. kept modifying the image and, occasionally, the correct image was not transferred to us.

I'm not sure what Ontrack means by "not imaging" but that doesn't sound real good.
 

Preferred User

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Yea I know what "image" means in the way you guys are talking. But I'm not entirely sure what it means the way Ontrack is using it. Maybe cman's got a bead on it....one of the heads is bad and it won't read the image. Something's gotta pick up the image and I'm not entirely sure how a clean room like Ontrack does that all.

I'll let you know when I find out more.
 

mindido

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Preferred,

I'll be interested to know what the final bill for this is going to be. Think maybe then she'll get the idea it really is a good idea to back stuff up?
 

Preferred User

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mindido said:
Think maybe then she'll get the idea it really is a good idea to back stuff up?

We'll see. Most people go to church for a while right after a near death experience.....
 

Preferred User

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mindido said:
I'll be interested to know what the final bill for this is going to be.

Just got a call from Ontrack. The final bill................$100. That's the price for the evaluation. They took it apart and the heads had scratched up the disk so badly that they deemed it "uncoverable".

I haven't had the guts to call the client yet. Mondays suck enough without me calling and giving her that news.
 

mindido

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Ouch! Thats probably about the worst news she could get. If that doesn't teach her the value of backups, I don't know what will. I take it that they can probably recover portions of the data, but that would wind up costing mucho dinero.
 

Cman

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Preferred User said:
Maybe cman's got a bead on it....
I DID actually work in a computer store for a while, before choose to sit at home on my ass all day, and I do have a computer related diploma, so I'm not totally full of shit :lol:

edit: yeah kidding
 
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