I have been reading across various articles on data recovery over the internet and suddenly I came across one document, which had some funniest suggestions for recovering data from hard drive, which is experiencing physical crash. For people who do not know what physical crash means, check previous entries of my posts.

I will try to highlight some of the suggestions given in that document. The most interesting part of the document was that one of the data recovery companies has released it.

Table of contents had these topics

Freeze it, Drop it, Hit it

• Hold the drive upside down, making gravity change the head geometry ever so slightly. Vertical is also another option.
  
  
• Slightly rap the drive with your knuckle, (but nowhere near hard enough to damage the drive).
  
  
• Try the drive in another machine, (slight drive voltage change assumed the miracle worker here).
  
  
• Rap the drive just SLIGHTLY harder than you did above in 2.
  
  
• Freeze the hard drive in the freezer for two hours, and place in a plastic zip lock bag to prevent condensation from forming on the drive when you plug it back into the system, (head geometry, electrical resistance lowered, electrical contact points adjusted, etc., assumed the miracle here).
  
  
• After the drive warms up to room temperature or better, rap it even harder with your knuckle this time.
  
  
• Repeat all of above steps on next day, as sometimes I have gotten data off drive simply by trying again.

Well after the miraculous attempts suggested above I am sure the drive must have been died, most probably drive would not be having any mechanical or component failures. Freezing the drive might be a good idea, but the refrigerator in home is complete no no.

Warning: Please do not try and the steps explained above, if you have a drive that is experiencing physical problems, it is advisable that you should consult a professional data recovery companies such as Disk Doctor Labs Inc, Ontrack and drivesavers.

Most of us wonder what do the people in data recovery labs do to recover data from your drive. If you see data recovery as a process, it does not involve any planned actions, as it is always a reaction based on the cause for data loss.

Let us categorize it in two major categories

a) Physical Crash – where drive is not getting detected by the BIOS of your PC and the drive has either electronic, mechanical failure or some kind of damage such as accidentally dropping the drive, fire, flood or any other external cause.

Recovery from such cases involves an attempt from an experienced recovery professional to make drive working by any means. If drive has electronic failure, the engineer would try to look for similar electronic board in the inventory to make drive working. If the cause is mechanical which is mainly head making clicking sound, is broken or is jammed are repaired by opening it in a class 100 environment and it is not necessary that it has to be a clean room and it is impractical to have a clean room for such small device.

I have heard of many tricks people try to make drive working in such cases, for e.g. dropping drive from a small height on a soft surface to ease any jam. Freezing the drive if drive has quick heating problems, let me tell you these attempts are extremely dangerous and can make the drive permanently damaged.

Read more! »

RAID systems are considered the safest storage where data is stored in strips to improve performance and parity to regenerate lost data. HP (Compaq), DELL, IBM, delivers some of the most popular RAID servers etc. In recent years network storage has gained popularity such as NetApps, Snap Server, buffalo tech and many more. These NAS servers have inbuilt RAID storage and is accessible from a high-speed network to all its users assigned by the administrator of the storage.

Despite having the hardware protection, these servers comprising RAID devices do fail and data loss does happen. RAID recovery is not an easy job to perform, even if you know about some of the recovery tools available in the market. Taking the drives out from the failed RAID array and attaching them to another machine maintaining the same order would be difficult for novices.

Then approach the most difficult portion of RAID recovery, which is reconstructing the RAID. There could be various causes to a RAID failure.

• RAID reinitialized accidentally by the administrator causing a new array to be formed and losing old data and configuration.
  
  
• One of the drive has failed and RAID is not coming up
  
  
• Drives going offline suddenly and not being mounted due to power surge or mishandling.
  
  
• RAID card causing RAID to fail

The most important portion in RAID recovery (specifically RAID 5) is to identify correct parity order and stripe size, and also the block size (the size of a cluster formed when we format a drive, sectors combine to form a logical unit which is know as block or cluster).

Below mentioned are some of the useful names, which might be able to help you, reconstruct RAID and thereafter you may use a cloning application to create a single volume, which can be mounted as actual RAID volume. Once the volume is mounted, recovery becomes easier.

• File Scavenger (Quetek Consulting Corporation)
• R-Studio – RAID Tools
• RAID Reconstructor – GetDataback (Runtime Software)

Similar to human, files do have ghost , when you delete a file considering it to be a god like behavior. Now, what happens if you empty the Recycle Bin? Surely that’s the end of the file’s life? We feel that file is gone but with an undelete utility there’s a good chance you can bring back the file to life like a ghost – so once file is back the only thing which comes to mind is Murphy’s law “The probability of a hard-disk crash increases with the number of days since the drive was last backed up”. So we start thinking of putting up a serious backup mechanism in place and think that we would follow our backup procedures religiously but again Murphy has a saying for this “You can’t prevent disasters, but you can diminish their frequency and severity”.

Ok, so now the real stuff is you’ve deleted a file or files, and sent them to the Recycle Bin. Then, being careful, you emptied the Recycle Bin to free up the disk space.

Oops! Your wedding pictures were in that folder! Or the pictures of your Hawaii trip.

And those pictures are gone!

Google “undelete” and try third party undelete applications.

Of course the most important precaution, the less work you do with your computer, in the meantime, the better your chances of recovering your deleted files/folders intact. Saving more files on the same partition would cause permanent data loss as new files might overwrite orphaned deleted data.