OT data recovery

We had a 'puter crash :( and lost a day's sales records and, more imprtantly, payroll data.

I'm mounting the HD in a USB portable unit and putting in the freezer, hoping to get one last spin. If that don't work, are there any other good ideas? Otherwise, anybody know what a data recovery vendor costs and any suggested vendor?

Karl

Reply to
Karl Townsend
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Has that worked for you before?!

A local guy gets from $129-600 for recovery, depending on size and importance of recovery. I guess he tries harder and longer on the important stuff.

-- Doctors prescribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.

--Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, about 250 years ago

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Is that a Seagate Barracuda drive? If so, it may have failed due to a firmware failure on the drive. You have to remove the board, and use a TTL serial connection to make the drive run again, then flash the new firmware if the drive isn't completely corrupted. I finally found some connectors that fit the data port. They are single row, 2 mm spaced contacts. I am going to have some boards etched, since they are very fragile. I used a USB to TTL converter to reset my drive when it failed. All the data is on the hard drive of my main computer, which just died. The motherboard has a bunch of leaking electrolytics and I am waiting on the replacements. 37 low ESR capacitors, which give you 74 chances to destroy the board. It's a Dell Optiplex GX620, which also has a high failure rate for the power supply fan failures.

Data recovery services can cost $500 or more.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Sometimes I use a Linux box to access a stubborn drive.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Karl, what error message did you get when your computer crashed? Was it, in fact, hard drive related?

i
Reply to
Ignoramus10295

JOY, stuck dying drive in a USB portable case, then in freezer. it fired up and i copied just a few K of data. A minute later i heard the whirring squeak and it breathed its last gasp.

A fella on RCM said a cold drive will run a bit, sometimes.

Karl

Reply to
Karl Townsend

Thanks for the feedback.

I bought a CD bay hard drive caddy for this laptop to put the backup drive on the IDE bus where it will show S.M.A.R.T. data, particularly to see how fast the reallocated sector count is growing and how bad the seek and write error rates have become. The free disk utilities I have don't read S.M.A.R.T. from USB drives, including new SATA ones.

If like me you are still patching up your favorite 7-year-old laptop and see the hard or CD/DVD drive suddenly become extremely slow, this is how to reset the IDE bus from

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

My shop and office 'puters are old beater IDE drivess. never had a failure without warning. The sales and payroll 'puter had a nearly new SATA hard drive. it died withoug warning while four customers were standing in line.

Karl

Reply to
Karl Townsend

I wondered what the benefit of SMART is as every time I've had a HD fail I've never had any notice. The HD failures were sudden and mainly substantial read errors that made the drive unusable yet never any warning from the system. Is SMART something that needs to be enabled in BIOS but still needs additoanal software to monitor and warn the user about problems.

Reply to
David Billington

I scoured the local stores for a few new IDE drives and set up my laptops so I maintain and update a master copy of the system on the "good" module bay drive and copy it to an older, junkier primary drive for daily Net use. The primary hard drive on this Dell Latitude plugs into the side in a little carrier that I bought a bunch of, so I can just plug in another if one fails or becomes infested. BTW XP copies only work in the PC they came from as it tracks the CPU and MAC address.

Which means I stopped looking so hard for good free S.M.A.R.T. monitoring s/w. I can run the old drives until they fail.

These seemed promising:

formatting link
After I finish tediously matching up this deteriorating year-old Samsung 160 to its three non-identical backups of everything I've ever downloaded and RMA it I might try them on a "sandbox" drive.
formatting link
HDTune gives the S.M.A.R.T.data when you stop to run it, bit not continuously. I like its Benchmark which graphs read speed (subject to random Windows interruptions) and the full-disk error scan. I've used it to find and partition around a defective area and to test new drives during the store return period. A full error scan of a USB2 external drive takes around 12 hours per terabyte.
formatting link
Some of my drives give really wonky values for some S.M.A.R.T. parameters, like stellar core temperatures and run times in the decades.

jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Timely!

I guess it works, sometimes.

-- Doctors prescribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.

--Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, about 250 years ago

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Well, I've tried the freezing with limitted success, and in Guelph Ontario there is a data recovery service I have used. Recovery Force,

519-750-3169, 350 Speedvale Ave. Price varies with the job - usually a couple hundred bucks.

HOWEVER - there IS a program you can use to recover data from a drive from a company called EaseUS. The data recovery wizard is about 70 clams - and it WORKS (or at least it has for me several times). The drives were not even identified by the computer bios, but when attached to a R-Drive III USB adapter, the program found all the files I needed to get off both drives.

GREAT TOOL!!!!

Reply to
clare

Michael, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper, and less hassle in the long run to just replace theOptiplex with a better computer????

Every time I get involved with one of them it turns into "the Dell from Hell"

Reply to
clare

I had a good experience with Geek Squad, although others told me to steer clear of them. It was around $500. Any Best Buy has one inside. They gave me back more data that I asked for. SWMBO had data that had to come back. I would have paid more but didn't have to. Time is the problem. I think it was a month or more getting it back. No affiliation whatsoever, just a satisfied customer. They try a trick or two in the store. If the drive does not read, they box it up and send it out for level 1 service. That is about what they do in the store. It usually don't work and they call you you and ask if it is ok to proceed with level 2 ($500). You say yes and 75% or so of the time, they fix it at that. Otherwise it goes to level 3 and that is where they tell you if you have to ask what it cost you can't afford it (I am exagerrating a little here but you get the point) . They keep you informed during the whole process so you don't get stuck with a bill you can't pay. This was a year ago around the Louisville KY metro area. YMMV. Good Luck Lyndell

Reply to
Lyndell Thompson

Important other info I forgot about: They provide your data on a new flash drive unless it is huge and they will put that on a brand new external hardrive. Either way copy it on you new computer and preferably copy on anotehr drive of some type (i.e external hardrive). They say the flash drive can sit around and gather static electric or something and lose the data you just payed $500 to get back. This would not be good. I was told it is like at light bulb........you get a good one and sometimes you get a bad one. Just food for thought. I have the flash drive , new computer and an external hardrive. The hardrive is in a fireproof area. Lyndell

Reply to
Lyndell Thompson

The EaseUS is busy restoring an old Seagate that belongs to a customer

- in an hour and a half it has located 34000 picture files - has another 2 1/2 hours or so to go. Another drive that was totally unaccessible through windows on a computer. Running EaseUS on a windows machine it pops up after about half an hour.

Reply to
clare

Good tip. I've used their free partition software with excellent results.

-- Doctors prescribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.

--Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, about 250 years ago

Reply to
Larry Jaques

It has 4 GB of RAM & a 1 TB HD. I've been replacing bad caps on multilayer PC boards for decades, and a kit of capacitors is only $12.

The capacitors in the CPU power supply are Oscon 4V 560 uF, and have a very low failure rate. It's also recommended to replace the PS fan because of a high failure rate.

I noticed some noise in the video, just before the two blackouts and the Southbridge power is filtered by the bulging capacitors. I used to do work like this on 17 layer boards for Telemetry systems at the factory. My favorite metal to work with is 63/37, .015" in diameter and has multiple cores of flux. :)

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Have you ever used Clonezilla? I recently replace two small hard drives for a local business and used it to copy an 80 & a 160 GB drive to new 500 GB drives. For those that aren't familiar with it, it is a group of HD utilites thar run under Linux. You download the .ISO and burn it to a CDROM with a program like 'Deep Burn' Not all CD burning software will produce bootable CDROMs. Both programs are free and availible online. If you need and can't find them, let me know and I'll locate the sites again.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Sounds like the Ersin Multicore SN63 that I prefer as well. Mine is a bit thicker - 22 ga, 0.71mm, or about 0.028 inch.

I've replaced a lot of those caps as well, on motherboards and monitors. And I've lubricated and repaired many Power supply fans - even though you can buy replacement power supplies for not much more than a good fan. I just find the Dell's generally more trouble than they are worth - compared to the higher end Acers and Lenovos I generally work with.

Reply to
clare

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