Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

Data Recovery for the Rest of Us? 35

Posted by Cliff from the rescuing-critical-data dept.
Filly-O-Fish asks: "By ironic coincidence, the day the IBM Deskstar Failures story was posted, both my 40 gig 75GXP drives failed. Whilst I don't have the cure for cancer on there, I do have some personal data that I'd really like to try to recover. No way could I afford to have it recovered by a professional data recovery company. I looked at a few software packages, the most promising one being ACR Mediatools, the demo version available only shows you your lost files though, you have to register($499) to actually recover them. Yes, I realize I should have backed them up regularly.. but I haven't had time to back 80 gigs up to CDR, and I can't afford one of these babies. Are there any alternative cheap(!)/free solutions to get my data back?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Data Recovery for the Rest of Us? More

Data Recovery for the Rest of Us?

Comments Filter:
  • my friend lost a drive of mp3's one time and found a util which recovered the partitions, but it didn't support long file names. it was free tho. Just do a google search you should find some utils for free or cheap.

  • A Backup Tape, A Backup Tape, My Kingdom For... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 14, 2001 @08:17PM (#2428798)
    Total hard disk crash - O pestilence!
    Now is the winter of our disk contents!

  • Helpful alternatives (Score:5, Informative)

    by man_ls ( 248470 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @10:56PM (#2429185)
    If you want to reconsider a professional data recovery choice, try Drivesavers [drivesavers.com]. I've seen them in various computer publications and they seem to be pretty honest, but I have never used their services so I'm not sure.

    Searching C|Net Downloads [download.com] I found Recover98 which seems to be the best package there. It costs $169 to register, which provides access to all features, and support for Windows 2000 dynamic drives [tomshardware.com](Software RAID arrays), NTFS 5, and it's really small. Again, I haven't tested it, but it looks decent. The trial has save features partly disabled but you can at least see if it looks good, and it is certainly cheaper than a professional data recovery service.

    I haven't had the (mis?)fortune of using an IBM hard drive since my 12.5GB one in an older system of mine. Are there any thoughts of a class-action lawsuit based on the drives' failure to perform properly? If new drives are failing this often, there is a definate problem.

    JKoebel
    • There are several data recovery companies, although when the firm I was at needed data recovery a few years ago, I helped shop around and got the feeling that they were reselling each others' services. There might only actually be one :-)

      There were able to recover most of the data from a nonfunctional drive. The cost was thousands of dollars.

      Naturally, this was followed by an greatly increased willingless to spend thousands more on backup systems...
    • The folks that have been at it the longest are at Ontrack. [ondi.com] I know some of the guys that work there. Pretty smart guys with lots of tricks.
    • Drive Savers is promising although, it costs $500-$1000+ for economy recovery which is their cheapest package.
    • I have used drive savers and they were the best. they found every file but 1. (28,000 files).

      one thing they told me is that a drive should be regularly defragged, because it makes data recovery simpler.

      -michael

  • EasyRestore by PowerQuest (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @12:20AM (#2429434)

    http://www.powerquest.com/easyrestore/ [powerquest.com]
  • my ibm 75gxp (30 gb) grinded to death and I lost my /home directory as a result =(
  • Has anyone out there done it with Debug or Norton's Disk Editor? I have a drive with scrambled partition tables that I used a recovery program on and then discovered it might have been Chernobyl infected so now it's worse than when I started and it looks like I'm going to have to copy to another drive in small handfuls of bytes at a time. Any helpful suggestions, dire warnings, etc.?

    • Re:For those of us without scads of disposable inc (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've used Norton Disk Editor to recover deleted files before, but it was a lot of work. First of all, I've only done it for FAT, I suspect it would be just about impossible with NTFS5 given the complexity of the latter.

      If you know the path to the file(s) you need and their directory entries are still intact, you can use that to find the first cluster of data... which hopefully hasn't been overwritten yet... And from there, you can walk the FAT chain to get the file back. Otherwise, if the file is a text file, you can search the whole disk for strings in the file and rebuild the thing (create a directory entry for it and write a new chain corresponding to the clusters you find).

      You can do this, and for me it was kind of an interesting exercise at first (not that I was happy about having lost so much source code), but... Consider before you start how much time you're going to spend, and how much money you could be making during that time. Automated recovery tools might start to look reasonable.
    • Consider using dd, grep, etc. on a Tom's Root/Boot [toms.net] disk.

      -Peter

  • A few tricks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Monday October 15, 2001 @10:06AM (#2430511) Homepage Journal
    There is no really cheap way to go, but . . .

    You might get a little more luck if you put the drive in the freezer for a while first (not sure what the IBM problem is). If it is heat related this will buy you a bit of useful time.

    If you have some access to the drive but the filesystem is trashed, you can get a lot of data with dd. (This months sysadmin has an article on /file/ recovery, and some of the techniques would be applicable here.)

    Finally, drives are made of parts, and you might be able to replace the bad part. This is pretty easy if it is the drive logic. (a few screws and maybe a little solder)

    If it is anything except the platters themselves you can swap the platters with a good drive. (Replacing the heads, which are the most likely culprit.) The big downside here is that you have to trash a good drive (of the EXACT same type) to do this. The resulting drive is NOT to be trusted, or you will find yourself in the same position again very soon (hours or days), since you probably don't have a clean room handy to do the swap. (I suddenly think of "The Manhattan Project" when that HS kid is handling the weapons-grade plutonium with a fish tank and some rubber gloves.)

    Good luck (you're gonna need it).

    -Peter
    • While I find it hard to imagine someone actually doing this, the idea of building a fishtank-style clean-room and actually using it for this sort of operation does appeal to me.

      I can imagine doing it completely off-the-shelf, by building a working envelope with plexiglas and silicone sealant, hooking up two over-large dish gloves (or surgical gloves) with extended cuffs for mobility, and a HEPA filtration system providing a positive pressure feed. Most of the components could be purchased at Walmart.

      Actually using it would be interesting for crazy operations like you outline - last resort efforts of the Nth kind. Makes me wonder if any person or group has actually done such a thing...
  • I've had good luck in the past with Lost & Found [sofsol.co.nz]. I don't believe it works with ntfs but I know it works well with fat. It claims to be able to recover from any drive that still spins.

  • Who backs up all 80 gigs? (Score:3)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Monday October 15, 2001 @01:26PM (#2431750) Homepage Journal
    I've got about 300 gigs (soon 700) on my network. Most of that is MP3s and (soon) SHNs. This stuff has all been burnt to CD long in the past, so it's safe, so I don't bother to back it up.

    That having been said, get yourself a DDS-2, DDS-3, or DLT drive next time. Back up as much of the important stuff as you can. I'm pretty sure you'll run out of "important" stuff before you run out of even a DDS-2 tape. It's awfully hard for me to find 4 gigs of stuff I absolutely can't live without on my machine.

    Good luck in your recovery efforts; hopefully in the future, if you get a decent tape drive, you won't need to worry about it so much.

    - A.P.
    • It's awfully hard for me to find 4 gigs of stuff I absolutely can't live without on my machine.

      Why bother with a dat tape? They're bloody expensive. And I have a hard time finding 700MB of stuff that I absolutely can't live without (all source code backups, ICQ and email for the past 5 years, and personal documents easily fit in under 100MB).

      But it's about all those 300GB of MP3s that you have that you want backed up, and it's not very practical to do that onto CD.

      That's why I'm just buying extra drives and mirroring the set. No problems then. It's extremely unlikely that I'll have a dual failure at the same time, so I'm not too worried.
      • Why bother with a dat tape? They're bloody expensive.

        Huh? DDS-1 tapes can hold 2/4GB and are about $3. A DDS-2 tape is well under $10 and can be used hundreds of times before you have to toss it. DLT tapes are rated for thousands of passes and cost about $30. So, you either spend (20 cents * 2000) = 400 dollars on CD-Rs, or 30 bucks on a DLT tape...

        - A.P.
        • Huh? DDS-1 tapes can hold 2/4GB and are about $3.

          And how much is the drive?

          IIRC a lot more than the $120 that you can get a decent CDR for.
          • Recurring vs. fixed costs. General accounting. If I spend $250 for a DLT2000XT drive (which I did) or $150 for a DDS-3 drive (which you can) or even $120 for a CD-R, that's a one-shot deal. The funny thing is, the tapes are almost a one-shot deal with DLT drives. When all is said and done, you'll end up spending more backing your system up to CD-R than I will to my DLT drive, and, unless you use $1 Kodak Golds, I daresay my DLT tapes will outlast your CD-Rs.

            There's a reason businesses use these things... and it's one of the reasons I choose to use it to. (It was also affordable.)

            - A.P.
            • If I spend $250 for a DLT2000XT drive (which I did)

              Cool! Where'd you get it! Cuz I would love to back up all of my data, but using a pile of CDRs isn't appealing.

              Recurring vs. fixed costs.

              Mind you, I bought 10 CDRWs and thus have 7GB to back up all of my important data on that I don't have to spend more money on. I still find that solution cheaper than yours, if a little less convenient. The nice thing with the CDRWs is that they can be read in anyone's computers.
  • Are you 100% positive they are 100% dead? A lot of people with the 75 GXP problem found they could get their data off by powering back up the drive. Some ran the IBM utility... Usually it went like this - 1) crash/lots of loud noises, 2) copy data off asap, 3) curse IBM.

  • Ontrack (Score:2)

    by BRTB ( 30272 )
    Right when I read the article about IBM 75GXP hard drives crashing, my nice new 60GXP 60gb drive(supposedly the newer model - faster and without the problems) decided to start creating bad sectors right in the middle of whatever NTFS5 calls its FAT. Win2k decided it didn't see the partition anymore, and kept asking "Drive D is unformatted. Would you like to format it now?" Scary part is, I had my big Comp-Sci project on there, and a DDS-2 drive was in its box waiting for me to install it.

    So I brought the drive into work and ran Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro [ontrack.com] on it overnight. Somehow it was able to analyze, recover and copy every file on the drive, even those which were written on top of supposedly bad sectors. Unfortunately, EasyRecovery Pro isn't cheap ($500), but it works great.

    I still can't get that DDS-2 drive (an ARCHIVE Python something-or-other) to work though, Win2k sees the drive but won't recognize the new tapes I'm feeding it.

  • But, you've basically got three kinds of problems:
    systemic hardware problems (doesn't read, reads only half the bits)

    Localized hardware problems (killed or kills some sectors, possibly an increasing number) Possibly causes filesystem problems.

    software (filesystem) problems

    Now, 1) you really can't recover from, unless it's intermittent 3) doesn't happen by disk failure... if it's 4, you need a utility that grabs what it can, runs, and can get past filesystem errors.

    But if your drive is really splattered, it won't work. Try dd /dev/hd2a see if you can get anything. If you can't, you're screwed unless you can perform a physical repair.

    (I spent hours running repair software on a floppy with a big project, to no avail, before a friend ran his direct sector read on it - with no success. He then removed it and pointed out that the metal had separated from the media, and the media wasn't spinning. So, using a toothpick, I superglued them back together, and recovered 97% of my data (but no FATS) )

Slashdot Top Deals

"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight

Close