Re: Data Recovery Services

[Liam Proven]

On 21 January 2016 at 12:50, Peter Faraday  wrote:
> Iv had some luck with drives where the head gets suck in the park position.
> If the drive spins up then shuts down it could be this. Bit of an
> agricultural fix but, take the lid off and give the head a slight nudge off
> the centre and get the lid back on quick.  I'm lead to believe this will
> only work with old drives dew to the tolerances in gap of head to platter.
> Big risk with this is crashing the head into the disk but iv used it a few
> time with 100% success. The drives were from early 90s


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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Re: Data Recovery Services

[Peter Faraday]

Iv had some luck with drives where the head gets suck in the park position.
If the drive spins up then shuts down it could be this. Bit of an
agricultural fix but, take the lid off and give the head a slight nudge off
the centre and get the lid back on quick.  I'm lead to believe this will
only work with old drives dew to the tolerances in gap of head to platter.
Big risk with this is crashing the head into the disk but iv used it a few
time with 100% success. The drives were from early 90s

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 6:30 AM, Chuck Guzis  wrote:

> On 01/20/2016 11:26 AM, Pete Rittwage wrote:
>
> The services can be expensive (in the thousands, typically) so the data has
>> to be pretty valuable to you in order to proceed.
>>
>
> I'll second Drivesavers--they've recovered very damaged drives, including
> a few buried in mud after a hurricaine.  They'll rebuild a drive if they
> have to.
>
> They're also one of the few companies who have working relationships with
> SSD makers and claim that they can un-brick many dead SSDs.
>
> Nice people, too.  But yes, expensive, very.
>
> --Chuck
>
>

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Chuck Guzis]

On 01/20/2016 11:26 AM, Pete Rittwage wrote:


The services can be expensive (in the thousands, typically) so the data has
to be pretty valuable to you in order to proceed.


I'll second Drivesavers--they've recovered very damaged drives, 
including a few buried in mud after a hurricaine.  They'll rebuild a 
drive if they have to.


They're also one of the few companies who have working relationships 
with SSD makers and claim that they can un-brick many dead SSDs.


Nice people, too.  But yes, expensive, very.

--Chuck

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Pete Rittwage]

> I need to recover some files from a SCSI drive that failed over a decade
> ago.  Are there data recovery services that can determine if the files on
> the drive can be recovered or can actually do such a recovery?  Now that
> I think about it, I recently also had a fairly new Western Digital drive
> suddenly no longer be seen by any Windows PC and I really need many of the
> files on it.  Can anybody here tell me if drive manufacturers offer
> recovery services? I ask this since I saw a post somewhere that Seagate
> offers some sort of file recovery via cloud storage.
> As you can tell, I am by no means super-knowledgeable about modern systems
> since I am from the WANG 2200 MVP, WANG PC, and WANG Basic 2C era, and
> still have a few pieces of WANG hardware collecting dust.
> I apologize if I am posting this to a group where it is inappropriate.
> Thank You,
> John
>

Hi John,

There are many of them- we've used OnTrack (Kroll) and DriveSavers.

The services can be expensive (in the thousands, typically) so the data has
to be pretty valuable to you in order to proceed.

-Pete

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Mark Linimon]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 02:53:07PM -0800, John Robertson wrote:
> Yes, I know, it depends on the age of the drive as I suspect early ones were
> possibly tuned to the mechanics of the drive. Nothing made after 2000 is
> likely to care much though.

Of course I should have stated that I used that drive _exactly once_
to archive the bits off of it.  There is no way I would run something
like that in production ever again (even on a desktop).

In this case if some data had fallen due to bad-block-rot, it would
still have been better than having 0%.

(Really, there were a small number of files that had not been backed
up elsewhere.)

mcl

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Mike Whalen]

On January 20, 2016 at 5:06:19 PM, Eric Christopherson 
(echristopher...@gmail.com) wrote:

It can work. But I remember reading that each PCB keeps track of bad 
physical blocks; if you transplant the PCB from another drive, you might 
end up with a different set of bad blocks beings saved. 

I still haven't gotten rich enough to use his services, but I've talked 
to this guy named Scott Moulton, who charges $50 evaluation fee + $750 
per drive. He also teaches classes on doing it yourself (for big bucks). 
His web site is . 
I’ve worked with Scott Moulton. He’s reasonable compared to some vendors. YMMV, 
but I find him to be extremely helpful. You can email his firm and they will 
talk over options with you before you send the drive in. The $50 does not 
obligate you to anything (other than the $50).

I can’t recall exactly what he told me but many modern drives have a chip on it 
that would need to be moved to a donor PCB in order to spin up the drive. I 
want to say there is some encryption involved the the chip provides. It’s been 
too long since I received that email from him and I can’t find it.

Also, it’s worth doing a little bit of Googling for modern drives and problems. 
I got _very_ lucky one day with a drive which was known to have a firmware bug 
in it that would occasionally lose its ability to determine the drive size. 
With help from the web, I was able to rig up a USB-to-TTL converter, connect to 
certain pins on the drive, then access the firmware shell and repair the drive. 
I don’t want to give any indication that this was easy. It took quite a few 
days of trying. Not only did it involve the converter, but there was a process 
where you’d insert paper between certain PCB contacts and the hard drive to 
interrupt the spin-up process as that was your window to get access to the 
firmware. But it actually worked and I was able to image the drive and move the 
contents to a new drive. 

So put the model number into Google and see if you can find a common failure 
that has a fix. 



Cheers,

m

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Eric Christopherson]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016, Mark Linimon wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 12:35:22PM -0800, John Robertson wrote:
> > If the drive's PCB turned out to be the problem, could an identical
> > drive model act as a donor for a known-to-be-good PCB?
> 
> I've done this on modern drives.  It is not particularly tricky.
> 
> mcl

It can work. But I remember reading that each PCB keeps track of bad
physical blocks; if you transplant the PCB from another drive, you might
end up with a different set of bad blocks beings saved.

I still haven't gotten rich enough to use his services, but I've talked
to this guy named Scott Moulton, who charges $50 evaluation fee + $750
per drive. He also teaches classes on doing it yourself (for big bucks).
His web site is .

(On one of mine, I was hoping data recovery would be cheap due to the
cause being in the filesystem rather than the media, but he charges the
same rate regardless.)

-- 
Eric Christopherson

Re: Data Recovery Services

[John Robertson]

On 01/20/2016 2:00 PM, Mark Linimon wrote:

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 12:35:22PM -0800, John Robertson wrote:

If the drive's PCB turned out to be the problem, could an identical
drive model act as a donor for a known-to-be-good PCB?

I've done this on modern drives.  It is not particularly tricky.

mcl

Yes, I know, it depends on the age of the drive as I suspect early ones 
were possibly tuned to the mechanics of the drive. Nothing made after 
2000 is likely to care much though.


John :-#)#

--
John's Jukes Ltd. 2343 Main St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 3C9
Call (604)872-5757 or Fax 872-2010 (Pinballs, Jukes, VideoGames)
 www.flippers.com
"Old pinballers never die, they just flip out"

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Göran Axelsson]

Den 2016-01-20 kl. 21:35, skrev John Robertson:

On 01/20/2016 11:22 AM, JC White wrote:
I need to recover some files from a SCSI drive that failed over a 
decade ago.  Are there data recovery services that can determine if 
the files on the drive can be recovered or can actually do such a 
recovery?  Now that I think about it, I recently also had a fairly 
new Western Digital drive suddenly no longer be seen by any Windows 
PC and I really need many of the files on it.  Can anybody here tell 
me if drive manufacturers offer recovery services? I ask this since I 
saw a post somewhere that Seagate offers some sort of file recovery 
via cloud storage.
As you can tell, I am by no means super-knowledgeable about modern 
systems since I am from the WANG 2200 MVP, WANG PC, and WANG Basic 2C 
era, and still have a few pieces of WANG hardware collecting dust.

I apologize if I am posting this to a group where it is inappropriate.
Thank You,
John

If the drive's PCB turned out to be the problem, could an identical 
drive model act as a donor for a known-to-be-good PCB? Of course this 
would depend on the model of the drive. Perhaps you can share that 
info and experts here may have better ideas.


Then you just need to find the same model...and I just drilled out 
four old SCSI drives the other day to kill the data dead (software 
company's drives). Didn't think to save the PCBs...


This could also be a 'shake & bake' drive that needs a bit of trickery 
to get spinning...


John :-#)#



Replacing the drive board could work. Some modern drives saves a table 
with data about the media in a on board flash that needs to be moved to 
the new board.
I've done that a couple of times with good results when the failure was 
on the board. (In one case obvious physically damaged board.)
There are several companies that sells replacement boards on eBay and 
they usually require your old board first to move the flash, then you 
get back the broken board and a second one with the correct flash.


By the way, I'm getting a copy of everything from cctalk without being 
subscribed to it so I can't remove that subscription. It means I'm 
getting dual copies for everything on cctech and that's a bit annoying, 
could someone with access to the list server remove me from cctalk, please.
I understand that this originated in some server upgrade / crash / major 
outage and I was hoping it would go back to normal after a while... it 
didn't. Thanks for all the work whoever you are that manages this list. :-)


Göran

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Toby Thain]

On 2016-01-20 5:00 PM, Mark Linimon wrote:

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 12:35:22PM -0800, John Robertson wrote:

If the drive's PCB turned out to be the problem, could an identical
drive model act as a donor for a known-to-be-good PCB?


I've done this on modern drives.  It is not particularly tricky.


Same.

To John: Where are you located? That will probably influence 
recommendations.


--Toby




mcl

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Mark Linimon]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 12:35:22PM -0800, John Robertson wrote:
> If the drive's PCB turned out to be the problem, could an identical
> drive model act as a donor for a known-to-be-good PCB?

I've done this on modern drives.  It is not particularly tricky.

mcl

Re: Data Recovery Services

[John Robertson]

On 01/20/2016 11:22 AM, JC White wrote:

I need to recover some files from a SCSI drive that failed over a decade ago.  
Are there data recovery services that can determine if the files on the drive 
can be recovered or can actually do such a recovery?  Now that I think about 
it, I recently also had a fairly new Western Digital drive suddenly no longer 
be seen by any Windows PC and I really need many of the files on it.  Can 
anybody here tell me if drive manufacturers offer recovery services? I ask this 
since I saw a post somewhere that Seagate offers some sort of file recovery via 
cloud storage.
As you can tell, I am by no means super-knowledgeable about modern systems 
since I am from the WANG 2200 MVP, WANG PC, and WANG Basic 2C era, and still 
have a few pieces of WANG hardware collecting dust.
I apologize if I am posting this to a group where it is inappropriate.
Thank You,
John

If the drive's PCB turned out to be the problem, could an identical 
drive model act as a donor for a known-to-be-good PCB? Of course this 
would depend on the model of the drive. Perhaps you can share that info 
and experts here may have better ideas.


Then you just need to find the same model...and I just drilled out four 
old SCSI drives the other day to kill the data dead (software company's 
drives). Didn't think to save the PCBs...


This could also be a 'shake & bake' drive that needs a bit of trickery 
to get spinning...


John :-#)#

--
John's Jukes Ltd. 2343 Main St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 3C9
Call (604)872-5757 or Fax 872-2010 (Pinballs, Jukes, VideoGames)
 www.flippers.com
"Old pinballers never die, they just flip out"

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Fred Cisin]

If the problem is merely corruption of the file system, but the hardware 
is still working well, then the repairs could be almost trivial.

Re: Data Recovery Services

[Fred Cisin]

On Wed, 20 Jan 2016, JC White wrote:
I need to recover some files from a SCSI drive that failed over a decade 
ago.?? Are there data recovery services that can determine if the files 
on the drive can be recovered or can actually do such a recovery??? Now 
that I think about it, I recently also had a fairly new Western Digital 
drive suddenly no longer be seen by any Windows PC and I really need 
many of the files on it.?? Can anybody here tell me if drive 
manufacturers offer recovery services? I ask this since I saw a post 
somewhere that Seagate offers some sort of file recovery via cloud 
storage.


Recovery services tend to be expensive.  You'll need to decide just how 
much the data is worth to you.  Seriously.


If the problem is "external" (a problem with the circuit board attached to 
the drive), then repair or replacement of that board may work.


Try DriveSavers

If the problem is "internal", then you will not like what it costs.

But, NSA could almost certainly recover your data.