Drive recovery help

[The Gatekeeper]

To all you techies out there, especially those of you who have some Mac experience, I could use some opinions/advice.

I purchased a 50 GB My Book Western Digital external firewire hard drive a few months ago. I have a 1Ghz eMac with a 60 GB hard drive. I moved all of my iTunes, photos, documents and movies on to the new drive. I did not partition the drive. I also haven't backed up to another format for a long time. Stupid I know, but rehashing what I did wrong won't help me now.

So suffice it to say the drive has failed. I have sent it to the recommended data recovery company (recommended by WD to do things in a way not to void any warranty). Based on the errors I'm getting it sounds like a corrupt file. I am waiting to hear from the data recovery company as to what they find. The price structure they have given me is from $400 to thousands. I paid $200+ for the drive. I can replace the music, and movies, but the photos are a no go. I had alot of photos.

So what I need is any opinions or advice on what to do from here. Get the drive back and find a local place that might charge less? Try and do it myself?

Also, if it turns out to be a corrupted file, could I have prevented this by partitioning the drive and backing up to the other side? If not, how do I prevent this from happening again?

Thanks for your help gang.

[LostMyMind]

Yeah, corrupted file is a real pita. What you didn't say was what underlining file format was used. Assuming it was Mac, I'll have to say that will be up to the other Mac techies here.

But if it was any FAT format (FAT8, 16, or 32), there are several tools (some free) that can recover alot.

That is unusual for a "file" corruption to take out the entire drive. A really bad "sector" corruption might. But a file corruption are easily fixable. If they really told you "file" corruption, I'm guessing the data recovery company screwing you over. There are reason why file systems have back-up tables, just in case of corruptions.

On the other hand, the price you pay for doing yourself is this. You can completely lose everything with one wrong mistake.

Preventing file corruptions is hard, there are many reason this happen. The most common cause is lost of power before the cache is written. Which is why I usually set my external drives to "no write cache" so that the drive gets updated immediately. It slows it down some but it will take really bad luck to lose something.

[The Gatekeeper]

Yes it was FAT. That was the error I got when I tried to run disk repair.

The drive company doesn't have it yet. They were just giving me their pricing range. I sent it there because the manufacturer said I had to so as not to void the warranty.

My step-bro is a bit of a Mac tech, and he said that when I do reformat, not to do it as FAT. Of course I have no idea what any of that means

I guess I'll see what the data company diagnoses, because that is free. I'll post from there. Thanks for the advice so far Lost.

[LostMyMind]

If it's FAT it should be easy to recover a corrupted FAT table. Hook it up to a Window PC and run disk repair. Do you have access to any Windows XP PC that you can hook it up to?

If it's corrupted sectors, usually you can still access the drive just get alot of errors.

However, you must be very very carefull not to write anything to the drive. Only copy from the drive.

[Acolyte]

Failing that, hit it with GetDataBack FAT. GDB is GREAT.

[Pedersen]

My step-bro is a bit of a Mac tech, and he said that when I do reformat, not to do it as FAT. Of course I have no idea what any of that means

Ah, now I get to flex my poorly made analogy muscles!

Hopefully, this will help out a bit in understanding what people are talking about with this stuff.

First off, the easy analogy: Your hard drive is a filing cabinet, with files and folders, and you organize files by putting them in folders. I only mention this to be complete, I know you already know it

Have you ever thought about exactly how you store your files in a filing cabinet? The natural response, for most English speaking people, is alphabetically. Which means using the English alphabet. But, if you're Russian, you use Cyrillic. If you're Greek, you use Greek. Throw in a few others, and you get the idea.

The format of the drive is roughly equivalent to saying what alphabet you're using, so that the computer knows how to find the files. Saying that your drive is formatted using FAT would be like saying you wrote your labels for your file folders in English. There's some technical bits behind the scenes that don't mean much to non-techies, but that's roughly what it translates to.

So, how many different formats are there? Off the top of my head, I know of 13. I'm sure that with about 10 seconds of work on Google, I could find more. However, here's the ones you're most likely to encounter, and what they mean to you:

FAT: Highly portable. Most every computer can read it. Use it when you are working with a drive that will see use in many places, such as a pen drive, or sd card.

NTFS: Highly non-portable. As of the last I knew, only Windows was fully capable of reading and writing to it. Any other attempts are incomplete, or use Windows drivers to accomplish it. Use it on internal drives on Windows computers.

HFS/HFS+: Mac OS format, basically. Linux can read it easily. Windows can with the aid of some third party tool (I assume, though I don't know of the tool). Use for drives that will only be used on a Mac machine (USB, Firewire, or internal).

Now, if your drive was corrupted, the question becomes how corrupted? And what caused it? Depending on the cause (some are much worse than others), getting all the data off the drive might be as easy as connecting to another computer and using a file copy command, or as difficult as disassembling the drive and using various physical tools to read the magnetic encodings on the drive itself. Naturally, this costs more.

As for whether or not you would lose data by running one of those data recovery tools: It is very unlikely that data would actually be lost. Might be inaccessible, very difficult to read, but unlikely to be gone, unless/until you write to the drive. Once you save something on that corrupted drive, all bets are off.

Now to induce paranoia in some people: How many times have you deleted a file which had embarassing contents, and believed it was gone? The truth is that, unless you use specific tools to erase that data, the data can be recovered with nearly 100% accuracy. Sometimes, even those tools don't get rid of it. So, how to dispose of a drive then?

Go with the government methods:
Run DBAN (http://www.dban.org/ )
Disassemble the drive.
Drill holes through the platters.
Dissolve all of the above in acid.
Once acid has been removed/dried, burn what's left.
Bury burned parts in secure areas.

Yes, it really is that hard to permanently destroy data that's been stored on a drive.

Sleep well!

[The Gatekeeper]

O.k. I'm learning lots. I can be a bit of a sponge for some of this stuff.

The drive is off at the data recovery centre, and as to what conclusion they come to, and how much data I get back...well it's wait until they get it.

Right now my question is looking forward, and that pertains to backup. I had been backing up to DVD but wouldn't you know it I hadn't done it in ages, and when I tried to do it during a moment when the drive was up, I erased the first disk. Anyway, backing up to DVD is no longer an option, as I was now at 13 DVD's. So who has some useful suggestions for the future? If I had partitioned the drive, and backed up to the other side, could I have just reformatted the defective side and used the back up? Pros, cons? Other suggestions?

[Pedersen]

Ah, how to backup. The age old question of every user. Want a simple, safe, recoverable suggestion that can be done overnight with great ease on the Mac?

By yourself a firewire drive, at least 10G larger than your internal drive. Next, boot from your OSX install CD. Install OSX to the firewire drive. No, I'm not a raving lunatic, you really can do it, and it really does work.

Now, each time you want to do a backup, plug in your firewire drive, reboot your computer, holding down the Open-Apple key. It will bring up a menu of bootable drives. Boot from the firewire drive.

Start up Disk Utility (under /Applications/Utilities )

Inside Disk Utility, Click on the partition that holds your drive. Go to the menus, "File", "New", "Disk Image from <disknamehere>", and have it make a new image. Store the new image on the firewire drive.

Restore is drop dead simple: Next time you run Disk Utility from the firewire drive, click on the drive, drag the disk image onto the drive, and it'll begin restore.

Only works on Mac, but wow, is it ever nice. And this is coming from a Linux fanboy

How much time? Eh, do it right before bed. It'll be done in the morning, then you can shut down, disconnect your backup drive, and reboot into what you're used to.

[The Gatekeeper]

I was using the program Backup, and the drive that is holding all of my important files was an external drive.

My computers HD is only 60 GB, the external was 500 GB. I was booting from the computer but had my music, photos, movies, and some documents on the external.

Does your suggestion still apply?

[volatile]

What I would recommend, if that data is THAT important to you, is to have to differing methods of backing up. I would recommend that firewire hard drive that was suggested and continue backing up on DVD...maybe you can get a dual layered optical drive to reduce the number of DVDs. You can use the hard drive to do your incremental backups and DVDs to hold your full backups. You never want to put all your eggs in one basket. Your firewire HD is like any HD, it is prone to breaking down. In the worst case scenario if your primary HD goes kaput and your firewire hd dies, as well....at least you have your DVDs, which is about a stable media as you are going to find, to fall back on. The backup may not be as up-to-date as your hd but it is better than losing everything.

[Shabo]

Try to run the data recovery tool the others were talking about. If that doesn't work, then you will probably have to send the HD off to the company you got quotes from. If the problem is a bad sector, or the HD not spinning correctly, they will probably have to take the HD apart. If they do, then the price is going to have to be closer to $1000 since they need to use special machinery and do it in a special room called a clean room.

As far as partitioning the drive... (I'm going to steal Pederson's analogy here) It takes a single physical filing cabinet and turns it into two (or more) virtual filing cabinets. Your computer will see it as two separate HDs, but they will be using the same hardware. That being said, if the problem with the HD is something like a bad sector, the HD might be able to use the other partition provided that both partitions don't have corrupted sectors. If the problem is the HD dying, as in no longer spinning properly, or if a read/write head was damaged, or if the actual disk is damaged (like by dropping it), then no partitioning is going to save your data. It all depends on what the problem is.

Oh, and Pederson... magnets are usually good enough. I could see the government wanting to destroy data like that, but if you disassemble the drive and take a nice magnet to it (or a low level format while the drive is still assembled)... well, identity thieves aren't going to spend that much time and money trying to get at your data. It's just not worth it for them.

[Pedersen]

Oh, and Pederson... magnets are usually good enough. I could see the government wanting to destroy data like that, but if you disassemble the drive and take a nice magnet to it (or a low level format while the drive is still assembled)... well, identity thieves aren't going to spend that much time and money trying to get at your data. It's just not worth it for them.

Actually, they're not. Remember, this is a format that is designed to retain data using magnets. It would be like using light to erase a DVD. It can be done, true, but the strength of the device required is not something the average person has at home.

So, how do you do it at home, and get it safe enough that identity thieves won't be able to use it? Simple, DBAN (http://www.dban.org/ ). It's a bootable CD, and will erase all hard drives in a computer. Choose the method which has a name starting with dod (I forget the exact name right now), and wait a while. With very large drives, you could wait a long while, as in several hours. But it will scramble the bits on the drive sufficiently that it would take highly specialized equipment to recover the data, and even then would not likely recover most of it.

[Shabo]

Mmhmmm, but if you take apart the drives and apply the magnet directly to the platters, the magnet you would need wouldn't be as strong. Plus, then you could discard the platters separate from the HD casing, and it would be much more difficult to clean the disks, reassemble them, unscramble the data, and steal it. They probably won't even look twice at it at that point.

Speaking of really powerful magnets...

(don't think I'm weird or anything for knowing this, I live on a farm...)

There are some pretty powerful magnets that you can buy from a livestock supply company. They are cylindrical, and heavy. They are designed to be inserted into a cow's stomach by way of shoving it in the back of their mouth, and they sit in the first compartment of the stomach and collect any metallic objects before they can puncture the digestive tract. We used to have some cows, and now that the cows are gone (yum!) we use these magnets as fridge magnets. Of course we washed them off first.

I would have to imagine that those would be powerful enough. *begins scheming to run home and test her theory on a really old PC that is no longer used...*

[LostMyMind]

It's not a matter of how strong the magnets are. It's a matter of the motion you use moving the magnet over the drive. It's just easier to throw it in a fire pit

[The Gatekeeper]

Well I heard back from the data recovery company. Enjoy:

I'm attaching the quote here for your recovery. Unfortunately it is a
head-crash with some moderate platter damage, and due to the size and
difficulty puts you closer to the top end as the overall likelihood of
success is fairly low.

Problems / Failures:
Physical damage to the read/write head assembly.
Minor media damage located throughout the platter surface.
Damage to the volume mapping information.
File structure damage.

Total costs for the recovery of your data will be $2,150.00 CDN

So yeah...um..........