I have several bare internal hard drives in rubber gasket semi-enclosures because I want to connect more drives to my desktop computers than can fit inside the cases. Recently, my nephew accidentally knocked one of them – a 750 GB Samsung model – from the desk to the floor while it was running.
The loud, rapid, persistent click-of-death can have no other explanation than a head crash. I’m a programmer with 30 years experience, so I can definitely rule out any other explanation such as a stuck rotor or damaged drive electronics, as the symptoms are quite different. Freezing and the other self-repair tactics absolutely will not work in this case.
Unfortunately, the drive crashed while the new drive I ordered to backup that particular drive was still being shipped. It arrived two days late.
Much of the data on it is essential and can’t be replaced. So I’ve been requesting quotes for professional, clean-room data recovery services. The thing is, the estimates for effectively the same data recovery procedure are all over the map - they range from $499 to $3900!
So I turn to the SDMB to ask: Will those of you who have employed data recovery services please describe what company you chose, what your experiences were like, and how much you paid for how much recovered data?
My one experience with data recovery wasn’t as bad as yours. I lost a controller on a SCSI drive - not dead, but very flakey. Lots of very valuable data, and I made a mistake in the backup configuration that overlapped with another mistake whereby important data was going somewhere it really should not have been. Result - I had to get the data back. I’m in Australia, so recommendations aren’t much use. But my experience was both good and bad. They did a great job getting the data back, and they charged me $8,000.
I would say you are doing the right thing - get good reports about a company - and don’t let anyone near your data until you are really comfortable. Ask for a few references.
Also, be absolutely clear about how much money you are willing to spend, and get up front quotes and a clear understanding about how far the recovery company should go. Don’t let yourself in for any unfortunate surprises. There is always a walk away price, no matter how much you value the data. Be clear what it is. Sadly you will also have to probably spend that money, even if you don’t get your data back.
It probably isn’t a proper head crash, if there is a click of death, it is more likey that the head actuator is stuck. This is probably a better answer, as with luck there is no actual damage to the disk surface. If the surface is intact you don’t have to worry about the painstaking process of reassembling partial data. But a clean-room rebuild is going to be needed.
You will be investing in a RAID array now won’t you? It is very cheap insurance. Backups are only part of the solution. You need basic resiliancy as well. (Not to mention proper archiving.)
I have used Ontrack (http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.co.uk/) to recover customer’s data in the past. One time was a SCSI disk that had failed, another was an IDE - both were sent off to them and the data came back on a USB drive.
Another time a RAID controller failed but the drives were OK, they sent me a boot disk which started the server up from their own software and pulled the data off to a local USB drive.
In the main it was very successful but on the IDE drive a very large and fragmented database file was lost because some of the clusters were unreadable. It’s quite expensive though ranging from £4000 to £6000 GBP for about 30 to 60GB data at the time.
I am 0 for 2 on recovery of the files I most wanted from the two drives I’ve lost since 1991.
Both were SCSI-1, one Quantum and one Micropolis.
The directory was ruined in both cases so I got a huge pile of randomly named text files and mostly-unopenable other-types-of-files (I think several files got glued together, which doesn’t hurt text files’ openability but plays havoc with graphics files, video files, 3-D terrains, and so on)
Thank you, Francis, for such an excellent collection of sound advice. The Dope rarely disappoints!
8 grand Australian? Wow! That had to hurt. As I indicated in my OP, the highest quote I’ve received so far is $3900 USD, but the rest are substantially cheaper, averaging around half that at $1900. Perhaps the technology has improved and/or competition (and there’s a heck of a lot of it here in that business) has worked its magic. Every quote form asked for a business name, and since I didn’t provide one, perhaps they’re adjusting their estimates for home users (although only one company specifically asked if I were a home user or not).
One thing that annoyed me quite a bit was that every company’s quote form required that I explain the history of the disk and how the damage came about in detail, as well as inquiring about how many mb’s/gb’s were minimally necessary to qualify as acceptable recovery. Yet their resulting quotes completely ignored every bit of that info! One company even required me to send them a fax containing the exact same info I’d already provided on their web form before they’d provide a quote, so they’re sure as hell not getting my business.
Again, thank you for the first-rate advice.
It would certainly be great if it were not a head crash, but it may be perhaps too much to hope for since the physical shock of it falling from the desk to the floor while operating would seem to me to be rather traumatic. On the other hand, my deepest, most intimate working knowledge of hard drive internals starts with the era of Univac’s impossibly monumental, 2.25 ton Fastrand II disk-like magnetic storage drums (and at the 2008 inflation-adjusted price of only $1,078,180 for 90 MBs, or $12,000 per MB (at 6 bits per byte), quite a deal for “high-speed” access) and DEC’s ancient but lovable RK05 removable 14" disk platter holding the princely total of 2.5 MB each (hey, that’s almost twice what a basic floppy disk holds today, so don’t smirk too much), I would speculate that my understanding of current hard disk technology is akin to Isaac Newton’s understanding of quantum electrodynamics (if I were allowed to brag so exaggeratedly).
So perhaps you’re correct, which would be marvelous. My hopes had been based on the fact that the most important partition on that drive was at the end of the disk and was “hidden” (by changing the partition type byte), and thus was effectively unmounted. Ideally, that would mean that the heads never got near it (unless the shock was as bad as I imagine it would have been).
All good points, but all my RAID arrays are striped (RAID 0), the most reckless RAID type there is, considerably more reckless than not using RAID at all. But the speed improvements from RAID 0 are utterly phenomenal, so I won’t be changing that anytime soon. What I have been doing instead is using Acronis Disk Director 10, which copies entire partitions at a rate of at least 100 GB in 5 minutes or less from a RAID 0 partition. As for resiliency, I’m going to upgrade from Acronis True Image 11 to True Image 2010, which now includes a feature they call “Nonstop Backup™”, a type of semi-continuous backup of all changes every 5 minutes. I’ll use this with both source and destination RAID 0 arrays, which might be the only way to keep the “Nonstop Backup” from degrading system performance too much.
But one lucky aspect of all this is that the drive that crashed was not part of a RAID 0 array, which otherwise would have greatly multiplied the recovery cost!
(My, I do go on, don’t I. Just ask the infinitely patient AHunter3 about that!)
Gah! 4 to 6 thousand pounds? I’d have to mortgage the house to afford that!
I have a truly extraordinary, far ahead of the league software data recovery tool known as ZAR - Zero Assumption Recovery. It’s quite inexpensive and it’s pulled my butt out of the fire after several disasters. The Zero Assumption aspect is responsible for it’s success. Like any good tool, it never writes even a single bit to the drive being recovered, but I’m sure that’s nearly universal. I’d wager it would do at least as well as the software recovery tool you speak of, but that, of course, is just a guess.
Ontrack is one of the recovery companies I’ve requested quotes for, but they’re the only ones who failed to provide one. They say I need to call them for that, but I don’t buy that. I provided quite enough info on their quote request form, and the primary reason I believe they want me to call is so they can go for the hard sell. I refused to provide my phone number on all of the request forms just so that they couldn’t pull that trick. I’ll be choosing among the companies that fulfilled their promise to provide a quote via email…
Hey, I’m happy – but not at all surprised – that you’re still willing to help me out, oh thoughtful AHunter3!
Sounds like your data loss was on an earlier Macintosh system, my first and most beloved collection of personal computers, starting with the Mac 512, SE, and on to the IIcx (my favorite of all time) and Quadras. Motorola’s CPUs were always by far the best and most intelligently designed on the market, especially if you programmed them in assembler at times. How the horrific x86 chips became so popular is as tragic a tale as the demise of Sony’s Beta and SuperBeta technology. The worst technology often succeeds for no good technological reasons, but here I am using the enemy’s chips running Windows on 7 of my 8 computers, while the Quadra gathers ever more dust. Hey, ho, halcyon days…
But I recall an excellent Mac utility that would have helped a great deal with your problems: CanOpener. The name is perfectly well-earned, as it was able to open and extract whatever islands of partial data that still remained, regardless of whatever mess surrounded it in any random sea of useless bits. It determined the nature of those little islands of data – however fragmentary – from data analysis algorithms rather than relying on any identifier in the file or directory. In that regard, it was much like ZAR, which I mentioned above. I was frequently able to recover entire sets numerical, text, sound, picture and video data, or I was often able to recover enough fragments to re-assemble them into something worthwhile.
But in my current situation, pretty much every knowledgeable person on the Web or with these companies is quite strident about not even connecting the drive up again, let alone trying to use software recovery techniques, so I have to decide whether it’s worth the money to bother trying to recover it. But one big problem is that my memory’s much too poor to remember very much of what was on it because I don’t know the names of the partitions. Because I backup entire partitions at a time rather than create backup sets or even entire disks at a time, without knowing the partition names I can’t even contemplate how much work would be required to re-create it…
When I used Ontrack for data recovery from a crashed drive, they charged $100-200 for an initial examination of the drive. Based on that, they provided a list of exactly what could be recovered and an exact quote. The other big company I’m familiar with is DriveSavers and they only gave a vague estimate. The Ontrack approach was more useful in a corporate environment where I needed to get exact dollar purchase orders before they could proceed.
I’ve used data recovery places before. They are expensive but worth it. In one instance a decade ago, a salesman had a sales bid on his laptop and the drive went pop. It cost £1000 for an emergency next-day recovery. Since the bid would earn the company several million, it was a no-brainer. I think the company was Ontrack. The drive was shipped off and the data - including the all-important bid documents - was returned the next day.
I used the Geek Squad and got all the data I wanted off the bad drive. It was around $300-$400.
(This was a stand-alone Geek Squad location, the inside-Best-Buy ones don’t do data recovery.)
Yeah, I’ve never owned a non-Macintosh computer. The Quantum was in my 7100/80 PowerMac and was the only Apple-supplied HD I ever had just plain DIE on me w/o reasonable cause; the Micropolis was in an external case a few years later. I had one of those total :smack: moments and flipped it upside down to get to an item in my external SCSI chain that it was sitting on. Drive was not designed to be upended while running and the heads did a faceplant into the platters. Can only blame myself for that one, obviously.
Yeah, I remember CanOpener! You saying it would do something useful with a blobby mess of binary code that was once part of a Bryce 3D file now inappropriately merged with bits and pieces of some QuickTime VR file? CanOpener was great for prying into things, but still! Bryce in particular doesn’t seem to have much interest in opening and displaying less than a complete file, doesn’t know what to do with it.
Hi, AHunter3. You’re very probably right, at least as far as Bryce is concerned. My memories are old and very fuzzy, so I can’t recall why on earth I once tried to reconstruct a Bryce file or a part of one, since I don’t think I ever owned Bryce itself. I don’t recall if CanOpener had any success at all, but I take your point about the low probability of that working.
On the other hand, I recall being quite amazed at the level of success CanOpener had in resurrecting seemingly unrecoverable segments of QuickTime or MPEG-1 video, but that was mostly due to the fact that I did a fair amount of work for a couple of MPEG scientists and I was quite involved in developing the audio/video synchronization solution in what would become the MPEG-2 standard. Knowing the data structures helped a lot in employing CanOpener.
But I can’t imagine any reason I might have known anything about the data and/or file structure of QuickTime VR or Bryce data, so I very probably did not possess such knowledge.
You can buy cases that are designed specifically to be filled with arrays of disk drives, and then connect to your processor box. They aren’t cheap, but are certainly cheaper than you will have to pay to recover the data from this one accident. I’d recommend looking into that.
Yes, I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I thank you for reminding me of that option.
But there’s no small irony there. I performed an exhaustive search for such products, and the prices were astronomically high, and worse, few (or none?) of them could handle SATA hard drives; they were designed for IDE/ATA or SCSI drives (I already own a four-drive SCSI-I case, but that’s obsolete now).
I finally found an affordable SATA multi-drive semi-enclosure, in which one mounted the bare SATA drives in a quick-release plastic tray-like doodad which then slid into a minimalist four-drive plastic rack. You connected a run-of-the-mill desktop computer power supply (of which I have several laying around) to run the drives and you simply used ordinary SATA cables to connect each drive individually to the motherboard.
The thing is, I searched for reviews and the best were highly critical of the product, complaining that it was all too easy for the drives to accidentally collapse into a “pancake”, which often caused – you guessed it – the dreaded click of death!