Anyone here ever had to have pro data recovery from a hard drive failure?

[djtopcat]

What happened to me a few days ago is my own fault, you put important things off you pay the price.
I used to be very good at backing all of my music drives at least once a month. For my main on my Mac I always had routine Time Machine backups. For whatever reason I slacked off the last 5 months and only backed up my external drives and not my main Mac laptop drive.

That's a Cardinal sin, because I've dealt with crashes before but for some reason I naively trusted that the 750g WD Scorpio Black I bought from New Egg exactly one year ago. It had just passed Onyx and Disk Utility tests a few days earlier.

Why do I keep buying Western Digital drives? I've never had one last over a few years. They're consumer grade, junk drives built in Malaysia by 10 year old sweatshop kids and old ladies so what could possibly go wrong? lol

Anyway long story short, I was just watching a Youtube video on Chrome, might of had a few more open windows too, and all of a sudden the colored beach ball pops up and it freezes the laptop. So I did a hard power restart and to my horror up pops the dreaded white screen of death folder with the question mark... That of course means the computer can't find the operating system. gulp! No clicking, no loud noises no warning at all. Just nothing

I immediately removed the drive and put in a backup drive and attempted to boot the failing drive off usb. Disk utility saw it but it was not mounted on the desktop and the error message was "Invalid Node Structure" not good..

So next step I tried using a trial version of an app called Data Rescue 3 to scan the drive for recoverable files. It got to about 20% and 4 hrs to go and all of a sudden said "slow read" 197329 hours to go lol So I quickly abandoned that operation to try something else.

The drive was definitely still spinning, no clicking etc. Next step I used a recommended app called Diskdrill to make a clone of the bad drive DMG image.
This took about 8 hrs and it said successful, but when I went to scan the DMG it found nothing yet it said 690g of data? I may have done it wrong though.

Anyway I unplugged the bad drive, and the last thing I did was run an app I've used many times to fix corrupt disk filesystems called Diskwarrior. First i ran it on the backup clone of the bad drive and it said successfully rebuilt directory and a few errors were found etc. but then I wasn't sure how to boot the DMG? It wouldn't mount either.

So the very last thing I did was run Diskwarrior on the bad drive and it did nothing, just gave a message Hardware Failure
It was still spinning though, so I took no more chances and dropped it off to a local tech shop that is affiliated with Drivesavers
and now I wait nervously for the news. I know it's either one of two things 1)logical failure (bad data blocks,corrupt filesystem) or mechanical (head,reader,pcb etc) A tech friend said that all the file recovery software for Mac is garbage compared to Linux tools that the pros use, so hopefully they can save my files and it does not have to go to a crazy expensive clean room.
The bottom line is don't procrastinate if you value your files BACK THEM UP AND BACK THEM UP OFTEN! All mechanical drives eventually fail. Thankfully I did not lose everything just five months of my latest projects,pics etc. I hope to report back that the recovery was a success, but with Western Digital who knows?

Has anyone here ever had to go all the way to expensive data recovery services to get their files back? I've read that some places will charge ridiculous fees even though it's a highly competitive business.
Just curious.

 

[ketan]

i've had to in the past for usb drives and hard drives and i just go with the guy on the corner. it's between 100-200 depending on what needs to happen (or what mood he's in?). it's worth it for the peace of mind - i'm good with computers, but not like that.





but i can get that stuff reimbursed from my office, so it's not a big cost to me personally. i'm sure you could do it for cheaper, but you'd have to concentrate really hard for a few hours!

 

[granjero]

Yeah! I've done the pro recovery route.


The laptop that had the photos from when my son was first born. The hard drive went 'pop'.


I freaked out because of course I hadn't backed it up.


So I did an internet search and sent the drive off to a big company.


They rang a few days later and said, sure, I can see all your files here, do you want me to rescue them? It's £300. My wife said that was too much, and found a friendly small company that said they'd do it for £80.


The big company sent the small company the drive.


The small company rang, and said the flash RAM of the drive has been disconnected and corrupted. So there's no way of making sense of any of the data on the fucked-up hard drive.


End. No photos.


Still got the drive in case new advances in technology make it possible to recover data on drives with no RAM directory information.


Thanks for listenin' (I'd forgotten all about this.. new babies look pretty ugly any how).

 

[ppadilha]

my freshman year of college I went a little crazy with the T1 connection at my dorm and programs like Hotwire and Limewire, and obviously my computer got a ton of viruses. One of them was called Chernobyl, which I learned about because one day both mine and my roommate's computers wouldn't turn on - turns out the virus was programmed to attack on a certain day of the year, and it was made to fry the motherboard and fuck up the boot sector of the HDs. Also turns out that day was during the last week of classes, when I had 5 final papers due and was halfway into writing all of them. I spent a good chunk of my summer fixing the computer and then writing all the papers I owed my professors. I can't remember what I did exactly to get all my data back, but I think it involved paying a few hundred bucks for a data rescue program that managed to retrieve most of what was on the old HD.





the computer places know you're desperate if you're coming to them with a fried HD with things that need to be rescued, and they'll take full advantage of that. Doing it yourself will also take a considerable amount of time and you'd probably need something better and more expensive than DiskWarrior to do it. Either way it sucks, and there's no guarantee you can get everything back.

 

[johnblack]

Dropped my laptop a year ago, hard drive went ZZZZZZGGGGGGGGGGGnnnnnnnn


dead. dead laptop.





drove the read / write head in to the disk... like putting a brick on the needle of your turntable.





local repair guy took the drive to bits and recovered everything.


had to pay for the the hours worked, physical repair, the data recovery and replacement drive.


It did cost a bit ($600NZ / $420US), but i had my music production, design work and pics of my young daughter on there so it was a no brainer.

 

[Jimster]

Google are now doing unlimited online photo backups for free IIRC. I can't remember if there are any caveats on picture size, but it looked like a pretty sweet deal. We can argue about what rights they have to the images elsewhere.





I already pay for a service (Crashplan) which is pretty good and can backup NETWORKED drives (most services don't), so my NAS is always mirrored in the cloud somewhere.





I do computer shit for a living and can only advise that you keep as little on the hard drive as possible. Just think of a laptop as a TV, a device to view content - and always keep the content elsewhere. If you are carrying shit around a lot, in my experience, it halves the lifespan of the hardware.

 

[SPlDEY]

I started repairing computers in 1997, only a couple years after I started. I can still hear my first computer teachers words. NEVER EVER TAKE APART MONITORS, LAPTOPS OR HARD DRIVES. I trusted my teachers but I was only 14 years old.





18 years later. I've broken every rule you can break with a computer. I professionally built LAPTOPS. Diassembled MONITORS and replaced Inverters. I've frozen hard drives and taken them apart. There's no mystery anymore to me. Hard drives are only built to last about 3 years with moderate use, they generally tend to fail around 4 years, and I still have hard drives from 2001 that still boot up long enough for me to recover some files.





If your drive is within 4 years old clicking or beeping you probably have physical damage, but the data may still be recoverable.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoVBHG4kajA





If your drive is within 4 years old powering on not recognizing in the OS, but not clicking or beeping there is a 99% chance your data is recoverable.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfdSocc1__0





Data recovery services are bullshit. Clean rooms are bullshit. My advice to you guys never give up on your hard drive. If you're brave enough the fixes are simple, or you will be able to find somebody like me who is brave enough. Don't throw out your old broken drives the repair fees and data recovery fees are getting much much much cheaper. If some service tells you that your data is unrecoverable get a second opinion.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IckRYWNlQZQ





Get into backing up important files IRL. Learn how to back up the old fashion way. Burn shit to DVD's (consumer grade CD's and DVD's are known to last from 50- 100 years) print important family photos, don't sell your Vinyls and replace them with digital copies they don't last. I've got records from the 50's that still play with a pristine quality. Burn any Video files to DVD's.





It may seem difficult, but you can't rely on computers to backup your most important data.





Everybody's gotta learn sometime.








- Diego





ps, don't trust your most sensitive data with "Cloud services." They have no long-term guarantees, and in their current state they are Hack-able. I know this, because I used to work for Google Drive.

 

[djtopcat]

Right on Diego! You made me feel much better, yeah I'm an idiot for neglecting Time Machine for 5 months but I don't deserve to be blackmailed by these big data recovery places like Ontrack.,Gillware etc.


One place quoted me $50 per gig recovered! Lol There's a place in California one of my dj friends used called $300 recovery I think? They charge a $300 flat recovery fee, but only if 90% can be recovered.





Another friend who has done some data recovery diy jobs said I should have immediately backed up the bad drive on a Windows desktop, or even better a Linux based OS with something like DDrescue. He said there is no Mac recovery software worth a shit. He's guessing it's probably a logical failure (bad blocks,corrupt filesystem). Western Digital SATA drives are junk made in Malaysia by sweatshop kids, but still pretty durable. The fact that I hard restarted after a system hang probably corrupted the boot directory and filesystem. I'll post when I get the verdict.





On a side note I used to work for Costco, and there's word that Costco will have a 1tb SSD drive by Christmas for around $150.

 

[SPlDEY]

djtopcat said:


On a side note I used to work for Costco, and there's word that Costco will have a 1tb SSD drive by Christmas for around $150.







Love Costco & Love SSD's but I got bad news for you brotha: Solid state drives also fail pretty regularly. In a nutshell the technology is too new to know the exact rate of failure, but some engineers typically use 3-4 years as a benchmark.





With that information though you can still use any Hard Drive. Knowing to backup your data to a new hard drive roughly every 3 years. Or you can do go the route I recommended, backup important data in chunks to good quality DVD's stored in jewel cases and in 40 years from now check on that data and, back up the data to another DVD. The only hypothetical problem you will run into with this method is let's say in 40 years DVD readers became non-existent like the floppy drive.





Tip: Burn the disks at a slower write speed 4x. Write the date down on the Jewel case when you burnt the disks, and when to backup the disk 40 years later to your future self.





Cheers,





- spidey

 

[JectWon]

I have not had to send a bad hd to the pros yet. If you get it back and still don't have any data, let me know. I might have some suggestions for you to try.





I've had some good luck with 'diskgetor'. http://www.diskgetor.com/ You can do a demo scan, see what it will be able to recover and pay only if you find that you will get meaningful data out of it.





Good luck man, I know the feeling...and it sucks.

 

[LoopDreams]

My external hardrive got reformatted last year. The kicker was that my pc had recently been wiped and cleaned but I hadn't loaded my photos back on it yet from the external for reasons that lean to lazy and cross well into stupid. I lost no music, but A LOT of photos from the past ten years. I was gutted, so I took the pc into the best dude in my town. After a couple of weeks he was only able to recover maybe 5 % of the picks. He was pretty confidant that if we sent it out to someone bigger they would demand a large sum and not be able to do much more than he did.


All's to say, I really like Spidey's idea of backing up to a physical copy. Though it's wack that laptops don't even come with CD ports in them anymore...

 

[djtopcat]

The drive is hooked up to some pro Linux recovery tools at a friend's tech shop. Still transferring but verrry slow. Might take a week at this rate, but it saves some data it's worth the risk. Still do not know what is failing though, no clicking,buzzing,beeping just slow reads in places





Oh btw I got a quote from "Drivesavers" in Cali. Clean room data extraction for a 750g sata drive, only


$2,700 not including shipping and transfer drive cost Lol

 

[djtopcat]

update**





It's being imaged by the pros, 300g of 650 have been transferred in about 4 days.


The bad news it's only imaging 1g a day now, this sucker is on life support.

 

[JectWon]

djtopcat said:The drive is hooked up to some pro Linux recovery tools...







Do you know the name(s) for those applications/tools?

 

[djtopcat]

I believe the tech said DDRescue for Linux. Pretty sure it's free and open source, they also mentioned R Studio was excellent.





Whatever you do avoid Mac recovery software, it's trash compared to the Linux stuff. I bought a $90 app called Diskdrill to clone the bad hard drive to an external, but 8 hrs later and the scan results were only 1's and 0's The tech said it's possible I messed up the dmg by running Diskwarrior over it too.





So with DD they were able to image 300g of 650, the drive is painfully slow now but not dead yet, at one point they said it was imaging 1 gig a day! Lol





The total cost for a weeks worth of recovery and file sorting was $250. It could have been worse I guess. I suppose I could of run DD on my friend's Linux desktop and done the same thing, but I was freaked out, all I wanted to recover was the last 4 months of data, but sadly hard drives don't just add the data in neat chronological order.





Hey Spidey is there anything else I can try to salvage the rest, or should I just be happy with what I got about 50%?


I've used Spinrite a few times in the past for bad drives with some success.


I was hoping they could tell me what actually failed with the diagnostic tools they used, but the tech said no software can diagnose internal mechanical problems. It has to be opened up. I find that hard to believe, but I know the owner of this business and he's an honest guy. Backup your files people!











JectWon said:djtopcat said:The drive is hooked up to some pro Linux recovery tools...







Do you know the name(s) for those applications/tools?

 

[SPlDEY]

djtopcat said:


Hey Spidey is there anything else I can try to salvage the rest, or should I just be happy with what I got about 50%?







DDrescue should be able to do the job alone, but it sounds like they are running into a common problem. Ask the technicians - When using Linux if they were able to see your entire file system? IF so, they should not attempt to recover the ENTIRE drive. Focus on recovering specific folders where your files are located. Trust me, you won't need to recover Apple system files.





You can run DDrescue as many times as the drive will allow it, but if you're getting to that point where it's taking you 24 hours per gig. It's because they are trying to recover too many files at once. If they used a logfile they can stop the ddrescue process to try and mount the image and see what files they recovered and then resume the recovery process.





If they didnt use a Logfile they don't necessarily have to start over. It's still all good DDrescue has another tool they can use to generate a logfile for you called "generate mode"


using this command:





ddrescue --generate-mode infile outfile logfile





http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html#Generate-mode





^ That should help explain it for the techs





Here's some other programs that I can reccomend:





EasUS data recovery - Saved many drives with this one


PhotoRec & Recuva - Similar to DDrescue.





Like I said before, don't throw the drive away if it has any data left on it that you can't recover. There's always hope. If your techs are charging by the hour, and weren't able to recover all your files. I'd recommend that you still try to recover some of the files on your own using these tools.





- You're going to need USB 2.0 to IDE or SATA Drive Adapter


http://www.amazon.com/C2G-Cables-30504-Serial-Adapter/dp/B000UO6C5S'





- A working PC with a dvd-rom.





- A Linux Live CD to boot into linux (anyone of these are fine): UBUNTU RESCUE REMIX or KNOPPIX, Hiren's Boot CD, Ultimate Boot CD


http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html


http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/


http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd


https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/





If you get to this point PM me, and I'll help you from there!





- Spidey

 

[djtopcat]

Great thanks man! I'll ask them, and report when I get the drive back.

 

[djtopcat]

Got both the recovered and bad drive back, going through the files now. Definitely lost all the Windows apps that were in the Parallels virtual machine image which sucks.


They recovered a little less than 1/2 the drive for $250. He said normally it would have been about $800 worth of work. It was a logical failure, possibly firmware too and there were warning signs that I should have picked up on that I misinterpreted so hopefully someone can learn from my errors by reading this.





I had been getting fairly frequent kernel panics (system interrupts) in the last month or so (4), and they always had something to do with Chrome "bsd process = Google Chrome". If you have a Mac and you get a kernel panic, it's like the blue screen in Windows. Requires a hard restart and too many of those can foul up the drive. At least that is what the tech told me. I never thought the problem was with the drive when these popped up, I just thought Chrome sucks on Macs. Flash was usually the main culprit too. Macs and flash do not mix.





Anyway so the drive is probably not mechanically messed up, it's just got bad sectors all over, and that is what bogged down the imaging process. The tech said do not use Spinrite which I thought was weird, as I have used it on some pretty messed up drives in the past with good success. He mentioned something about they calculated how long it would take to navigate through the bad sectors in the drive and determined it wasn't worth it to try and image the rest. To me that meant hey we got as much as we want to waste our data recovery station time on, other customers are waiting.





So the moral of the story folks, DO NOT buy refurbished WD hard drives no matter how great the price,pay attention to the warning signs of a sick hard drive (slow response,shut downs), and most important of all BACK UP YOUR SHIT OFTEN!

 

[SPlDEY]

djtopcat said:So the moral of the story folks, DO NOT buy refurbished WD hard drives no matter how great the price,pay attention to the warning signs of a sick hard drive (slow response,shut downs), and most important of all BACK UP YOUR SHIT OFTEN!




Amen.





- Damo

 

[djtopcat]

I think this might be exactly what happened to my drive. Too bad this guy decided to retire and go golfing. This Linux command line stuff is like learning a foreign language to me.





http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/node/212