Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

Data Recovery from Jaz Disks 48

Posted by michael from the clik-clik-clik-boom dept.
mach-5 writes "I recently had an Iomega Jaz disk fragged by the drive (the data is corrupt from simply using the disk in another drive). I know that I can easily get a free (beer) replacement from Iomega, but what I really want is my data back, which is far from free. This is a little unfair considering their drive corrupted my disk. Has anyone had any success in having their data recovered by a drive company. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this particular company?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Data Recovery from Jaz Disks More

Data Recovery from Jaz Disks

Comments Filter:

  • Probably no warranty for data (Score:3, Informative)

    by knabar ( 261612 ) <knabar@yahoo . c om> on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @12:44PM (#3187944)
    I had dozens of bad hard drives over the last 10 years, but never heard about free data recovery. I think by using the hard drive, you accept the risk it might go bad and be replaced with a blank one. The same is probably true for any media (tape, jaz, floppy, zip)... But then, IANAL...
    • Yeah, this question is just like any other except that this time it's a Jaz disk vs. a normal drive. One would never think to sue WD or Maxtor to get them to fix your drives, a replacement is about all we ever expect. I've had Zip disks corrupted as well, and hd's obviously, so these are not good backup options.

      There have been other "Ask Slashdot" about good backup solutions, so those are the ones that can answer this question. Everyday usable media such as Jaz should not have been used for crucial data.
      • My favorite was when a dot com I worked for backed everything up on zip disk for accounting. One day the accounting server's hard disk died and they found out no one had made a backup since 1999. It cost ~10,000 dollars to get the data off the hard drive after shopping around. They fired some token IT people but they weren't the ones responsible for the server as they did not have keys to the room where the backups would/should of been made and had dutifully been buying zip disks for them that sat unused in stacks on top of the server. Iomega sucks the donkey wang big time when it comes to reliability.
        • The IT people weren't in charge of backups? They didn't have the keys to the room where backups would've been made? I don't know, this sounds questionable to me. I would've been clamoring for more control over backups to my manager, or his manager, if I knew that this was the situation at hand. "Dutifully buying Zip disks" is not enough of an excuse to say that there was nothing IT could've done to prevent this disaster, IMO.
          • Accounting had the golden keys to the kingdom upon their own demand at the inception of the company that they should manage everything locally AFAIK. They even had their own server closet with 2 wee NT servers sitting in it. I think the orignal accounting head was a semi-knowledgable tech weenie but I remember from my brief stay (4-5 months) that we had at least 2 changes of the guard in that dept.

            Realize that the IT people had no idea that the Zip disks were being used for backup and were blamed for not thinking that the accounting dept never had requested any sort of backup medium. When the company's IT people with me and some others from the datacenter admin team went in that room there was a layer of dust on everything and promo material like frisbees, pens and shirts from the company's inception. Realistically I don't think that anyone had actually been in that room since mid-late 1999 (this was mid 2000 when it happened). Hey that is probably an uptime of at least 6-10 months on 2 NT machines, pretty amazing in itself.

        • They fired some token IT people but they weren't the ones responsible for the server as they did not have keys to the room where the backups would/should of been made and had dutifully been buying zip disks for them that sat unused in stacks on top of the server. Iomega sucks the donkey wang big time when it comes to reliability.
          Righttttttttttttttt, Iomega [iomega.com] sucks for reliability because the company bought zip disks and sat them on top of the server. Last time I checked this wasn't the preferred method for backing up to zip disks..
          Sounds like the company is the one that sucked for reliability...
          • Actually both, the VC ran out before their second product line was introduced. Their first product line netted something under $3,000,000 for a bloated dot com workforce of 400 people with an average salary of $70,000.

  • backup! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by teridon ( 139550 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @12:54PM (#3188022) Homepage
    If your data is that important, make backups (i.e. more than one)
    • Assuming you don't have a backup, there is no guarantee you will be able to recover ANYTHING. However, here is what you can try:

      1: Make a physical copy of the disk (or an image) using diskcopy, dd, or something similar. I would further copy this copy so as to avoid further damage to possibly damaged media.

      2: Try to recover the filesystem on the duplicate image using conventional tools. If that does not work or further corrupts the information.

      3: If unsuccessful, use another copy and try running it through file recovery tools (The Coroners' Toolkit contains a utility called Lazarus which may help to recover at least part of your files for UNIX and similar tools exist on Windows). Read the docs before you begin, because of the potential for further damage.

      Happy hunting!

  • I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @12:55PM (#3188025) Homepage Journal

    I'd take the drive and be grateful it was offered. Most companies wouldn't do that much for you.

    If the data was that important, you should have been backing up. Maybe that sounds trite, but it's true. You've learned a leason. I hope you can rebuild/replace the data that was lost.

    • Re:I thought the replacement drive sounded fair. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I thought the bloody Jazz/Zip disks were targeted as backup medium?

      Okay, so he backs up to yet another medium. What if it fails? Who gets blamed then? Where does it end?

      I'm so sick of (computer tech) companies not backing thier products.

      • uuh...NO. they arent a backup medium. ever read the warranty information on the box ? they are most certainly NOT a backup medium. CDR's, AIT/DLT tapes are a backup medium.
        Basically you back it up as many times as is ecenomically viable. nothing lasts forever and you will loose data -- no such thing as data you cannot loose unless its printed out on acid free paper and stored in a vault.
        and no, no company is going to provide data recovery services. its not viable to sell a $100 drive with a $5 catridge if you need to spend $5000/customer recovering some idiots data who thought your product was a "backup medium".
      • OK. Let's get grounded for a minute here. What is just about the least reliable storage mechanism for data? Tape. What has been used for decades for data backup? Tape.

        Backup media do not have to be the most reliable storage medium available. In fact, if you employ a regular backup schedule, rotating media and all, your backups can sustain loss of data on any particular tape without losing very much (if anything at all) due to redundancy. Backups are for redundancy, and as such don't need to be as reliable as the primary storage medium.

        You may be sick of computer companies not backing their products. I'm sick of people demanding the world from suppliers while only being willing to pay $99.99, or $79.99 from Pricewatch (not a real price--just said for effect). Storage media fail. Some fail more often than others. Iomega has been guilty of peddling sub-par hardware, but then again, they offer it for sub-par prices. You get what you pay for.

  • Well I hate to say it but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tkrabec ( 84267 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @02:09PM (#3188658) Homepage
    GRC makes a very nice piece of software called Spinrite. I have used this in the past to recover tonns of data. I have not used the newer versions but if it anywhere near as good as the old version it would be worth a try.

    -- Tim
    • I second that opinion. SpinRite is a disk-recovery tool that does what you'd think of doing yourself. It tries a bunch of 'desperate' measures to recover your data in any possible way, using statistical analysis of read failures to figure out which bits are intact and which are corrupt, then pieces them together intelligently after successive read attempts from different 'angles'. It takes forever, but if your data is worth the wait then you will be thankful that such a great tool exists.

  • My advice: (Score:4, Funny)

    by wholesomegrits ( 155981 ) <wholesomegrits@mch[ ]com ['si.' in gap]> on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @02:14PM (#3188701)
    I've found this to be an effective option when dealing with Iomega. Be sure to follow these instructions exactly.

    On a level surface, place your feet, about shoulder width apart. Place the Jaz disk on the floor between your feet.
    With your hands on your knees, slowly bend over. SLOWLY! Ok.
    When you get your head as far as it can go between your legs, pucker up and kiss your own ass.

    After you're done, look at the Jaz disk, gurgle up a bit of phlegm, and spit on it. Repeat as often as necessary.

  • I know it's been said a thousand times...

    CDR's are pennies each
    A second, 100GB HD is about $120
    Tape backups are slow but cheap

    I know it can be a pain, buf if you have ANYTHING of importance, back it up!

    On a side note, how much work/data/$$$ do you think are lost to data loss, from drives getting smoked to accidently deleting files?

    • Tape drives are anything but cheap, in all my research. Drives cost a lot for anything semi-reliable, and once you've got this drive, it probably won't backup a single hard drive on one tape.

      Tape drives used to be practical when you could do a compleet system backup on a tape, but that basicaly isn't possible anymore.

      What tapes do give you is the ability to actualy have a backup scheme. Tapes are relatively(compared to the drive) cheap, so you can keep incremental old backups so that it is possible to go back and see what did that /bin/bash binary look like six months ago...
      • Tape drives are anything but cheap, in all my research. Drives cost a lot for anything semi-reliable, and once you've got this drive, it probably won't backup a single hard drive on one tape.
        Most new drives these days seem to be at least 12/24GB from what I've seen.. Though it won't do your 120GB drive full of MP3's etc, it will do your system partition, or a partition of db data quite nicely...
      • Tape drives are anything but cheap, in all my research.

        What did your research consist of? Were you pricing only things larger than this [storagetek.com]? I've bought $250 tape drives that suit my backup needs perfectly. (Or are you slashdot-poor and is $250 too much to spend?)

        Drives cost a lot for anything semi-reliable, and once you've got this drive, it probably won't backup a single hard drive on one tape.

        Forgive me for being arrogant, but you are not so important that your most prized data cannot fit onto a single CD-R. I have a 15/30GB DLT drive and I can't even fill a single tape on it; I've started backing up unimportant data just because I have the space! There's absolutely no way you need to back up an entire 160 gig hard drive, and, if you do, any decent backup program (even tar, which isn't a decent backup program) can span tapes.

        Tape drives used to be practical when you could do a compleet system backup on a tape, but that basicaly isn't possible anymore.

        Sure it is. Not every system has 2 terabytes of 100%-used space, especially not someone's crappy home desktop.

        - A.P.
  • That drive contains moving parts. Moving parts fail. Unless gross negligence on the part of Iomega resulted in your data failure, I think you're not likely to get them to pay for the data. Furthermore, since the data was stored on a medium for which their is an expected failure rate (yes, they even publish when it is expected failure), I think they would argue you should have had the data backed up.

    Good luck. But you should have been aware of potential failures in hard drives of all sorts, removable or not. I don't think you're likely to get very far on this one.

  • MTBF is the name of the game... (Score:5, Informative)

    by digitalmuse ( 147154 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @03:27PM (#3189243)
    Well, mach-5, I hate to add another negative voice to the chorus, but yeah, the disk is fsck'ed. If you can't fsck it with the standard commercial recovery packages, you are also fsck'ed. But the first thing you hear when you get a warm body on the other end of the Iomega Hotline will be, "we'll replace the media, but we can't be responsible for the data."
    And as unkind as it may sound, they're right. Check your documentation, it says it right there. the drive can grind it's happy little heads through your magnum opus, negating all those thousands of hours of grad-school, and all you're going to get out of Iomega is a new disk. That's the way it is, and that's the way it always will be. Every piece of mass-storage equipment in my house and office has a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) which is a fanciful metric that tells you how often you can expect said piece of HW to go tits-up and die. Iomega knows that their storage solutions have these limitations, and they inform you of this up front, with that MTBF rating.
    Jaz drives are great for backups, but you can't expect them to last forever, and you're a fool if you think that Murphy's law isn't hiding around the corner looking to fubar your day.
    You cannot expect Iomega to take responsibility for every cartridge they produce, no matter what conditions it is exposed to. It is not Iomega's job to ensure that they can recovery everything that is every put onto those spinning platters. I do not know of any company that has that kind of a guarantee, and I'd be very wary of a company that promised it could. Entropy will always increase, and 3am hardware failure can deliver more entropy than you can shake a stick at.
    None of this does you any good in your present position, but just like any other emotional tradgedy, there are steps and goals to help you with coping. Don't hate Iomega, how old was that disk, how much use had it gotten? Was it something you re-wrote over every evening to transfer stuff from work to home? Unless it died right out of the box (right on the leading edge of the bathtub-curve) you got at least some measure of use out of it, and Iomega succeded in delivering a product that worked. I know people who have used the same Jaz cartridge for 5+ years, millions of cycles, without incident. Others have had bad media that went south in a week.
    Iomega is not to blame for the statistical blip that you were on the receiving end of, and there is almost nothing they can do for you at this point. I'm not trying to push responsibility onto you for the failure, but you can't really blame Iomega, and they are not going to eat the recovery cost for the data.
    And that brings us to the next step, recovering your data. This is something you're going to have to pay for out of your own pocket, and you probably want to analyize your options before you start writing checks. There are several companies that do drive recovery and have a 'free-evaluation' process. You ship them the drive, they tell you how much cash to cough up to recovery it. This gives you an option to decided if all that pr0n is really worth $4000 of your student loan money. I would suggest talking to someplace like Accurate Data Recovery [a-data.com], Flat Rate Data Recovery [flat-rate-...covery.com] or some other place that isn't liable to hand you a $3000+ bill for pulling the data. note: I have no experience or interest in these companys. YMMV, do your homework, google.com [google.com] is your friend.
    All else fails, rip off the housing, drill a hole in the platter and nail it to the wall in your data center. This may act as a gruesome deterent to the other equipment in the room and keep them in line. Good luck.
  • I had a series of bad Jaz drives (not disks). I got fed up and wanted a refund, for all hardware, including disks I had bought. I phoned the president or CEO (don't remember which) left a moderately brief voicemail summarizing my problems, and finally got action. Normal channels (support email and phone) produced absolutely nothing.

    This was during a period of bad press for Iomega (remember Click of Death?) so maybe they were being more responsive than usual.

  • DriveSavers (Score:3, Informative)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @04:30PM (#3189646) Homepage Journal
    Everyone who I've ever heard from who has used DriveSavers [drivesavers.com] has been delighted. Their Hall of Fame [drivesavers.com] is pretty fun too.
  • Does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this particular company?

    Yeah, ask 'em for a Ditto drive instead. That way, you'll at least _know_ it's an unreliable piece of shit.

    --saint

  • Has anyone here heard of backups? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @08:39PM (#3191293) Homepage Journal
    Seriously. Consider this a lesson. If you do it again, we'll have to smack you around.

    If it's important to you, back it up. It doesn't matter how you do it: a rdist to another machine every night, a stack of floppies, CD-Rs, another Jaz disk, printouts, or getting it included in the next Information Society single as 150 baud line noise. The three key words: back it up. You're fully free to blame whoever you want, but, if it was important, it was up to you, and nobody else, to make sure it didn't get destroyed.

    Life sucks. Next time, back it up.

    - A.P.
    • Maybe the jaz drive *was* the backup? And he just lost his backups? It could happen. (Though your analysis is probably right.)

      • Re:Uhhhh (Score:2)

        by Lxy ( 80823 )
        This was my exact thought. Jaz seems like a nice backup solution. The only real backup solution I can come up with is one that involves multiple media. Take, for instance, the backup system I'm constructing at home:

        My linux WS: 40GB hard drive
        My wife's M$ WS: 40GB drive

        80 GB that potentially need to be backed up.

        Parts list:
        2 80GB drives ($100 for a Maxtor)
        1 IDE RAID controller
        1 small drive to boot linux/Samba on
        1 PC to host the thing
        1 DDS tape drive
        LEGO Mindstorms (to make an autoloader)

        RAID the IDEs together for 80 GB mirrored. In order for my data to be completely lost, my drive would have to fail and BOTH Maxtors would have to fail. In the event that happens, I have DDS backups of the RAID. Now, in case of fire, rotate the tapes off site... you see, paranoia can be taken to any level. In my case though, $1000 gets you a pretty stable, reliable backup solution. I don't know what could be called a PERFECT solution.

        I just spent 15 hours recovering my wife's MP3s. $1,000 seems like a small price to pay now.
  • It would be ironic if someone, upon reading the suggestions here goes and decides to back up the data on his Jaz disk.

    Which then fails as he copies the files..

  • I've had a ZIP drive for about 7 years now. Only had one disk go bad on me and im not sure that i was good to beign with. I only have 15 or so that isnt too bad.

    Backup medias are a tricky thing. CDs are great they last but are small.
    Harddives are great too but tend to get slightly expensive depending on how much you have to back up, if i was to back up i would have prolyl 20+ gigs of data to save. and i can hardly justify spending 60 for a harddisk that will only hold what i need to back up now. and im sure i will have to back more up later.
    Tapes well again with cost. Drive=XXX Media=XXX per-pop.

    Most Users would prolly be ok Just burning documents and etc... to a CD now and then. I recently backed up all my digital pictures to a CD (~300Megs-o-Data). And some website stuff to ZIP disk(~@20Megs-o-data)... Maybe a combination of backup medias is best for some. Can update the ZIP as often as nessary. and the pics when there are a signifigant number of new ones.
  • Then just do a:

    dd if=/dev/sg?? bs=1024 | strings | lpr

    This will both recover what data it can, and back it up to a stable medium all at the same time.

    But remember, dd can be both your best friend and your worst enemy. Sit on your hands and read the full command before hitting enter. It can suck to plaster your english essay over the boot sector of your hardrive.
    • It can suck to plaster your english essay over the boot sector of your hardrive.

      This is exactly what I did once. Well, it wasn't an English essay, but close enough. I had to use the drive manufacturer's low-level format utility just to make it useable again. Of course, that effectively fragged the disk. Thankfully, nothing important or irreplaceable.

      My boss laughed for a week.

  • Data Recovery (Score:3, Informative)

    by purduephotog ( 218304 ) <hirsch@inorbitSLACKWARE.com minus distro> on Wednesday March 20, 2002 @01:36PM (#3194848) Homepage Journal
    1) Dont' use scandisk. It'll destroy.

    2) Don't use defrag. Same problem.

    3) http://grc.com/intro.htm

    Try using spinrite - there's a chance the data can be recovered with that.

    Failing that, get Dolly - it's used to clone partitions. Clone it to a HD and then start looking at repair options.

    It's possible, its time intensive, and it's a royal pain- I hope you know what is on that disk because, otherwise, it's goign to be nearly impossible.

    Oh, and remember to have fun ;-)
    • Failing that, get Dolly - it's used to clone partitions. Clone it to a HD and then start looking at repair options.

      If you have access to a Unix/Linux box, you can use dd instead like this;

      1. dd if=/dev/input_device of=destination

      Where "input_device" is the device name, and destination is where you want the image to go (another device or a backup location). Once there, you can pop in a blank disk and restore the image to that before you start using any recovery tools. If you screw up your copy, make another.

  • A year or two ago I got a refurbed generation 1 2G Jaz drive from PCConnection for about $130 (yeah, I know, the folly of buying a drive that crapped out on someone else...). But it was replacing a drive that had died on me the year before, leaving me with about 20GB of useless cartridges that cost about $100 apiece. Anyway, the drive showed up in the mail and didn't work. PCConnection made me deal with Iomega directly.

    Iomega was actually quite helpful as long as I put up with all of the handholding and troubleshooting steps they read of their scripts before telling them what the problem was. They sent me a replacement - another refurbed drive. If worked - for 3 days, then died. I also found out that the first drive munged one of my carts. Another call, they sent me another drive. This one worked for a week and then died. I now had 2 bad carts (killed by their drives) and I had gone through three refurbed drives. I tried to remain calm, explaining how it was not acceptable for them to keep eating my carts by sending me defective drives.

    The told me they could not offer any data recovery services, and that I used the old carts at my own risk. However, to make up for my trouble, they sent me a brand new drive and brand new carts to replace the ones that got eaten.

    Not an ideal situation, but to their credit, they did make a decent attempt to do right by me, and for my $130 and a bit of hassle, I got myself a $300 drive and another $300 worth of new carts. This was a pretty good experience compared to the horror stories of Iomega customer service back in the early days of Zip disks.

    -Jeff
  • I'm sorry to have to be the one to say it, but in the immortal words of Nelson: "hah hah!"

    I have seen countless jazz drives and disks go bad over the years, both the 1 and 2 Gb versions. Makes me all the much more merrier that I didn't buy one and instead opted for CDRs.

Slashdot Top Deals

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

Close