HDD Data Recovery
Can anybody recommend a UK-based Data Recovery company?
On Wednesday I came to my desk to find an unresponsive (100% CPU in use) Windows. I tried to quit as many applications as I could in the hope of being able to gracefully shut it down. In the end I had to shut it down manually. Next time it started it didn't look good. Hal.dll was corrupt and Windows couldn't start.
All the Google results for the error I was receiving didn't sound promising. Most claimed there was no way back, but it might be worth trying the Windows recovery console on the install disk.
Somehow I managed to get it back up and running. Immediately I shoved a blank DVD in (disconnected the network) and starting backing up my desktop. Next time I came back though it had shut back down and the DVD was blank. Since then things have gotten worse and it looks like there's no way back. It looks like all my local files are lost.
Next thing I tried was to download Knoppix and run the laptop on that. From what I could tell it couldn't see or mount /dev/hda and when shutting down reported "bad sector" errors on it. Not good at all.
Yesterday I gave up hope and ordered a new HDD on next day delivery. It's here now and I'm re-installing XP from scratch.
Should I give up hope on the old HDD? It contains lots of things I'd rather not lose, such as:
- A month's worth of movies/photos of Felix.
- My carefully managed Notes desktop.dsk file.
- C:\Mail where Thunderbird kept all my email in a structured and colour-coded organisation that let me know what work was to do, who was waiting for a reply etc). I've not lost any emails. Just which ones I need to "action".
- A couple of dozen draft blog entries for here.
- Bookmarks
- Various project-in-progress folders from my desktop.
So, who should I call? All the websites I've found so far of UK-based data recovery compaines don't inspire trust. Trust is essential if I'm get to let them at all the data on the drive. Once in they would have easy access to a whole host of account names and passwords, thanks to Firefox's ability to remember them. Or would they need my Windows account password to do that? If not then I guess I could change the important ones before sending it off.
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Ouch!! Sorry to hear that, good luck with the recovery.
Jake,
I recently had some similar experiences with HDDs. One where I flashed the BIOS on my desktop which changed the HDD settings in the BIOS and when rebooting windows found thousands of "recoverable" files and ran checkdisk to recover - needless to say, the where not damaged, just that the FAT was arranged slightly differently due to the HDD settings in the BIOS - as far as I can tell anyway.
The other was a disk failure in my laptop (also bad sectors). Windows would not boot, and eventually the laptop would just reboot after the POST. I tried mounting the disc on my desktop in a little HDD enclosue but windows explorer would just not read it
On both occasions, I used a bit of software call ActiveUndelete (I know you've not actually deleted anything, as I didn't) but it recovered 99% of my data both from the desktop and the laptop. It's only about $50.
Hope this is of some use.
Some people says that freezing your HDD may help to recover it...
{Link}
You might also try Ultimate Boot CD ( {Link} ) which contains several HDD tools from constructors.
However, I've lost mine 2 years ago and haven't been able to recover the data (lots 3 months of pictures, personnal work, etc).
Good luck with it .
I've had good results using {Link} with a drive that was dying (metallic sounds, bad sectors, ...)
Sorry to hear about that.
I don't know any company in the UK doing that kind of work but where I work we had to do that a couple of times and we had the company sign all kinds of NDAs, terms of responsibility and whatnot.
I think sometimes they even charge us extra just for having to read and sign all the paperwork ;-)
I also used the Ultimate Boot CD that YoGy mentioned once with good results.
Anyway good luck!
I would recommend to use Spinrite. It is the ultimate harddisk recovery tool from Steve Gibson. I have never used it myself, but have heard a lot of positive reviews from people with dead drives. I know the product thanks to Steves' brilliant podcast Security Now! And oh yeah, Jake bad bad boy no backups!
Agree with Thomas, I would try SpinRite {Link} first. It's very straightforward: you create a (very small) CD image and boot to the CD, and then run the diagnostics against the hard drive. Pretty much, it's like scandisk done properly and thoroughly, and does extensive checking and attempted rebuilding of all damaged sectors (by moving data to non-damaged sectors) on the drive.
Definitely worth a try before you ship the drive off somewhere. I've never had to use a real data recovery service before, but I've heard the good ones are very pricey.
I've used www.vogon.co.uk in the past. Around £90 for their examination, then can be around £3000 for them to get the data back although it's next to impossible to get a quote out of them before they've looked at the disk.
Also, it looks like they've been bought over:
{Link}
Here's the data recovery section:
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It all depends on how much it's worth (i.e. how long would it take you to be back on track with everything you have).
Best of luck!
Hi Jake,
About 4 years ago I had 3 hard drives (1 server, 2 pcs) all die in the space in 36 hours on me (causes all unrelated - just bad luck and age).
I used OnTrack (linked by Robert above) for the initial exam and they could recover 2 of the 3 drives and said the 3rd had physically shattered that they could probably rebuild it but was the data worth the cost? In this instance it wasn't, though there was alot of important data there.
I would certainly recommend the initial examination by them and then decide whether the data in question is valuable enough.
Never make changes (write) to the existing failed drive directly as it could make things worse -- especially if you ultimately need to send it in to the pros for recovery. Instead, buy a new drive that's 3 to 4 times the size of your failed drive so you can have a couple partitions on it.
Freezing the drive can help in some cases, so you may want to do that for about 45min before doing anything. Then the best thing you can do is try cloning your complete drive to the new drive (but leave room enough on the new drive for another image or recovery session from another product) and use a cloning product (like Acronis TrueImage - www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/) which can boot of a cd. Once you have an image of it (hopefully the image will contain some data). Look on the newly cloned drive to see if your data is intact (using ultimate boot cd for windows or boot on to the imaged drive). If it's good enough -- great. If not, move on to next.
Try freezing it again for another 45 min., and try using Runtime software's GetDataBack for NTFS www.runtime.org/gdb.htm to have it recover data from your bad drive on to the new drive (in to another partition big enough as your old drive so not to destroy your cloned image) on to.
After all of that if you still haven't gotten enough data back, you've got to decide if you're going to send it in to the pro's or have one last attempt at it. But the last attempt will make changes to the drive, so it could potentially make things worse, although for me it's always made it better. :)
Get Steve Gibson's SpinRite from www.grc.com and run it in recovery mode. I've used it plenty of times and it can do wonders - but be prepared as it can take days to run (depending on how badly damaged the drive is). If it's corrected the drive's sectors that the imaging software or GetDataBack couldn't read -- you'll want to re-run GetDataBack and try to recover things again on to another yet another partition on the new drive (that's why you want a drive big enough so you can try all these things).
Good luck! :)
I don't know a good service but will make a strong recommendation for the lazy man backup that requires almost no interaction. For $50/year there is a service called Carbonite that backs your data automatically in the background to the internet based server in Boston. It defaults on most files like pictures and documents. You can manually specify(right click) NSF and other odd ball files and possibly directories.
For the $50/year there is no limit on storage space. It also keeps deletions around for a month.
I do not work for them but it has saved me.
I used easyrecovery {Link} once, they couldn't recover my drive as it was mechanically dead but they were affordable, professional and sent my drive back intact. A second company confirmed nothing could be done (lost the url) so I gave up. A few credible colleagues recommended freezing the drive as well (didn't work for me :o)! Good luck
I second the recommendation for GetDataBack ({Link} Used it to recover two harddrives successfully.
I found this nifty piece of software. It worked for me. {Link}
Jake,
I use Acronis TrueImage to take incremental backups of my system- and data-partition.
I got a separate pc to store my backup images.
I know this isn't much help to you now, but at least it will prevent such a disaster from happening again ...
Greetings,
J.
Thanks guys. Really appreciate all the help!
As we speak I have booted the laptop using BartPE and have started running GetDataBack on it. Promisingly it has found the drive and is scanning it while telling me it's identified 52,000+ files. Fingers crossed they will be recoverable (in which case I need to register GetDataBack and re-burn a boot CD to start over again). Looks good so far though...
Jake
Tou have obviosly found getbackdata which I would recommend.
otherwise in the past firms I worked used ontrack and found them quite good to excellent
They rebuilt a disk that had been soaked and all data was recovered, I think they rebuilt the disk.
On another occasion they rebuilt a failed array.
They have also recovered some data from tape for us.
{Link}
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Hello Jake,
Sorry to hear this has happened to you. My dad had the chornobyl virus many years back and lost $20,000 worth of work (CAD drawings). I tried using CPR on it (a pretty decent, for 1997, dos based recovery tool) but eventually had to send it to a place called The Clean Room. They were able to retrieve all the data he cared about... for $1500, which was a bargain as far as the insurance company was concerned.
Fingers crossed GetDataBack works out!
Jake,
No advise concerning recovery here, but I do want to share what I did to PREVENT such a thing from happening. First of all, it is easy to move some of the things you mention online, so that you do not have to worry about backing them up. Bookmarks, for example, I store at Google Bookmarks, I can access them via the Google toolbar from any internet-connected PC. No more syncing or backing up. All my email accounts come together at Gmail, as an ex-Thunderbird user, I can recommend it strongly, and Google spam filter is awesome. As for files, I have not found a decent way to manage them online responsively and cheaply, so I simply use a USB HDD to back up manually.
None of this will help you to recover your files, but hopefully it will trigger you to consider what stuff you can move online in a trusted way. I did, and I'm loving the idea of not having to manage it all myself.
-- Ferdy
Sorry to hear the bad news. The long term solution of course is paranoia.
The important stuff on my laptop is sync'd nightly to two seperate hard drives (in the same server), plus sync'd monthly to a portable hdd that lives at work. Plus there's random-ish backups to DVD.
One of the HDDs and the extermal don't sync deletes, so even if I have a brain-freeze moment and delete the wrong thing, it's only propogated to one of the backup points.
So at any one time the data's in atleast 3 places, and 4 or 5 after a month.
I used to sync to my ipod nightly as well, but ran out of room :(
Despite all that, I still feel like I need an extra backup or two.
Oh, and that's only for purely personal stuff. God knows what I'd do if I ran a business :)
Ben
I find people not backingup their important stuffs and regretting later. Anyways, Don't panic and do not test the drive further as may worse the situation. You immediately need to contact Data Recovery Services. I have found a UK-based data recovery company. Here's the website:
{Link}
See if they can help you...
Sounds like you are on track to recovery. In the future you may want to look into a solution to backup your Windows workstations. I have found that Windows Home Server is a dead simple solution for backing up any Windows XP or Vista client. It keeps backups on hard drives in a dedicated computer on your local network. In a disaster such as the one you experienced you would just need to perform a complete restore to a new hard drive.
Here is more information: {Link}