Smile and Nod

[trailerparkmedic]

My boss calls me, asking to borrow my reimaging CD. No problem, I bring it over to his office.

He calls me a few minutes later, the CD doesn't work. I troubleshoot, I call IT, I suggest a few ways around it, nothing works. IT and I figure that his CD drive is bad, despite his protests to the contrary.

In the process of troubleshooting, I ask him why he wants to reimage the computer in the first place. Apparently he wants to reimage the computer in order to retrieve some old files that he delete a long time ago.

Data recovery is WAY beyond my expertise, so I just smile and let him continue his (futile) attempts at reimaging.

[Captain Trips]

Reimaging won't recover those files. $500.00 and outsourcing might - but if they've been missing that long, the disk sectors may have been overwritten so many times that even the best data recovery service may not be able to get them back.

[lordlundar]

Reimaging won't recover those files. $500.00 and outsourcing might - but if they've been missing that long, the disk sectors may have been overwritten so many times that even the best data recovery service may not be able to get them back.

particularly if he's reimaging multiple times.

Oh well, his loss.

[trailerparkmedic]

Reimaging won't recover those files. $500.00 and outsourcing might - but if they've been missing that long, the disk sectors may have been overwritten so many times that even the best data recovery service may not be able to get them back.

I know reimaging won't bring back data. It actually made me laugh when he thought that reimaging it would bring back the data on a computer that is at least 6 years old.

He couldn't reimage it anyways, since his CD drive was dead. Didn't stop him from spending all afternoon trying to see if he could prove me and corporate IT wrong.

[EricKei]

Would reimaging not make things HARDER to retrieve? o_O

As for data recovery, I actually had to look some of that up for as client recently -- There are services out there for as little as $250, tho I suspect that's for "quick & dirty" service -- even Best Buy does that. The Real Deal in a Clean Room and all that is still costs Texa$

[lordlundar]

Would reimaging not make things HARDER to retrieve? o_O

Very much so. Every time he re-images, he writes over the data. After 6 years of standard use, folloed by the re-imaging, he'd be lucky to get 100 bytes of the data recovered.