-How does someone who has a bad hard drive select a reputable data recovery company from a Web search?
This is a difficult question, but I can provide several pointers.
There are a number of data recovery companies on the web, some of
which pay to have their names appear at the top of the list when you do
a search. Just because a company is at the top of the list or has fancy
graphics or seems like a big company does not mean a thing. Experience
in data recovery is the key. Many of these companies are run out of someone's
garage, or have just started up in the last few years or less. It is up
to the consumer to ask the right questions in order to determine which
of these companies are right for them. Keep in mind that data recovery
has proven to be a very lucrative venture, so needless to say there have
been many new startups in the industry by people trying to get a piece
of the action weather they know what they are doing or not. The number
one question is: How long has the company been performing data recovery
specifically? 2: How long has the company been in business doing data recovery?
3: Do they have a list of references that can be called to verify that
they are good at what they do?
A point to note is that many so called data recovery businesses
send their data recoveries to the half a dozen or so major players in the
industry and only act as middlemen, putting an additional fee onto what
they charge you. So question 4 should be, do you do all of the recoveries
in-house or do you sub them out. Many people ask what the success rate
is. This question will usually be answered with 90%. This is simply not
true! This is a sales tactic to get you to send the drive to them! Over
the last few years drives have been getting worse and worse and when they
fail, depending on many things, they fail in a catastrophic way. A data
recovery business depends on numbers of drives coming through the door.
It is a given that of 10 drives that come in, probably 35% of them will
be unrecoverable! The reasons for this will be covered shortly.
Some companies including the largest one, Ontrack, have stockholders they need to please and or sales people who need that months commission to be the highest, so regardless of weather the drive has a bad piece of electronics or has a very serious problem, they will try to get as much as humanly possible for the given recovery effort whether it is simple or complex. I have firsthand knowledge that what was a 5 minute fix was quoted out at an incredible $1500.00 from one of these large companies. Needless to say, the client decided to go to a much more reasonable reputable organization (ours) to have the work done for less than 1/3 the price. There really are only about 6 companies in the country that are any good at the art of data recovery and have the knowledge, tools and parts needed. So you see, it is easy for a person to be taken advantage of, because they have your data and you want it back! This can be a tough predicament. The bottom line is, try to get a feel for how honest or on the other hand how evasive they are when they talk to you about your problem. I hear so many reports from clients telling me that we were the first ones to actually tell them the truth about their situation! If they seem evasive or vague and tell you just to "send it in", stay away from them. We pride ourselves on our honesty and will tell you like it is from the start.
How much does the service cost for the average consumer?
This too is a difficult to answer question because there are many factors that go into determining the cost for a recovery. 1. The capacity of the drive 2. The operating system and 3. The nature of the problem. Drives as you know come in a large range of capacities.
At this time the average desktop user could have anything from a 2.1gigabyte hard drive to as much as a 75 gigabyte hard drive and in the case of a large business, they could be operating a spanned set of drives or raid with a capacity exceeding a terabyte! For the average notebook user, these capacities can range from 1 gigabyte to as much as 30 gigabytes. As an example, for a typical 8.4 gigabyte drive with a Win9X operating system the consumer can expect to pay a minimum of $250.00 to a maximum of $1500.00. With the same drive running an operating system of Novel, NT, 2K or Unix the top end can be up to $2500.00 in severe cases. Proportionately, you can determine from these numbers what your recovery will range. The bigger the drive, the more it costs. The cost will also be proportionate with the problem and again, the types of problems will be covered in a moment.
One thing to keep in mind is that many companies charge an evaluation fee. This fee can range from $100.00 to as much as $500.00 for standard service. In the case of an emergency or priority service this evaluation fee can be as much as $1000.00 or more. Some companies claim "No data, no charge". This can be very misleading, as if they are able to recover your data, and you decide their quote is too high, they charge you a fee anyway! Other companies charge no fee at all to examine the drive except for return shipping, like Drive Service Company. The truth is that typically it takes about 10-20 minutes or so to determine what the problem with a drive really is. In the case of severe corruption or other severe situations, the evaluation time can be much much more. If the engineer working on it is knowledgeable and experienced he will have a good idea of not only what the approximate cost of the recovery will be but also if it is even possible.
Some people may say " All I need is one file". Unfortunately, it takes just as much effort in many cases to get one file as it does to recover any file so cost is not necessarily based on the amount of data required. It really all goes back to what is wrong.
- What's the best way to prepare delicate hardware for shipping?
The best way to prepare a hard disk drive for shipping is to first place the drive in an anti-static bag. If you do not have one, you can usually find them at a local computer repair or sales store. If it is at all possible use a hard drive shipping box, as these are made specifically for this purpose. They usually have precut foam inside that cradles the drive very tightly. Try not to use the 3-inch FedEx boxes or any other type of box that does not surround the drive with at least 3 inches of cushioning material. Basically, just send the drive as if it were a raw egg, and you want it to get to its' destination without cracking. Make certain that there is no movement of the drive in the box.
If there is any mounting hardware or in the case of a notebook drive, a sled... remove it as you may not get it back. You want your drive or media to get there in the same condition as you sent it. If you have more than one drive, be sure to separate them by at least an inch of bubble plastic or there can be damage done during shipping.
More information on data recovery
The three most common problems seen today are: 1. The drive makes a repetitive clicking sound when power is applied (this may not always be audible to you). 2. The drive is completely dead, not spinning at all. 3. The computer bios sees the drive, but there is no boot and a boot from a floppy will not gain access or you get an error message that says 'Invalid media type reading drive X'. Of course there are other issues such as flooding (never turn a wet drive on!), fire and other natural and unnatural disasters all of which require a top notch data recovery company to work with.
If your drive is making a clicking sound, 9 times out of ten this means that the heads are bad and cannot read the information needed to get the drive to a 'ready' state. This can be due to two factors: physical head crash whereas the heads scrape some of the media off the surface of the platters thus destroying the heads in the process or the heads just go bad. The result is the same, the drive clicks. In this type of situation, you can expect an expensive data recovery because of what is needed to extract the data. The drive will have to be opened in a clean room environment, the heads will need to be replaced which requires an identical drive be purchased just for parts, and a skilled engineer will have to perform the difficult and meticulous task of aligning these new heads so they read the data properly. If indeed the media has been scored, there are many cases where there is nothing that can be done about it because so much of the recording material has been scraped off. Keep in mind that drives now sold are spinning at an incredible 7200 to 10,000 rpm, and that with this kind of speed disaster can be swift when it happens.
There seems to be a large number of electrical issues with drives these days, weather it be natural as in lightning strikes or man-made as in power outages and poorly manufactured power supplies. There are also known issues in many models of Maxtor, Western Digital and Quantum drives where a certain chip will simply burn up and cause the drive to stop spinning. About two years ago or more, Western Digital had a 500,000 drive recall as the result of a defective chip used in making many different models of drives. Over the last year or more, Quantum drives of many models had a similar issue, except this time, the numbers of affected drives was much higher. This was the driving force behind the acquisition of Quantum's hard drive lines by Maxtor! Maxtor is still reeling from the huge numbers of returned drives on a daily basis. One of the big problems is that manufacturers do not put a fuse on the drives' electronics anymore. You might say, "This would be an easy fix, I'll just get another drive of the same model and swap the boards myself". In an ideal world this would be the case but another factor most people do not know is that for each model drive made by a manufacturer, there can be over a dozen different revisions of the electronics even though the model is identical! This fact can make a simple problem very complex. Don't look to the manufacturers for help with this either, they will not.
If the drive is seen by the BIOS of the computer, and you cannot access it by booting from a floppy in the case of a WIn9X or ME drive this means that for some reason the areas that define the partitions of the drive or the boot parameters have been corrupted. This can be caused by a virus, a computer or software bug, using a third party partitioning software, running Fdisk or a number of other reasons. This type of situation can be an easy fix for a professional or it can be a more difficult one depending on the extent of any additional damage to the file system or data structures. Usually, this type of problem is an easier one to deal with, because the drive at least still works. In the case of an operating system other than Win9X like NT, corruption the the NT data structure can be a very complex mathematical problem and can be an expensive recovery as well due to the time it takes to solve. Operating systems like Unix and Novell as well as Spanned sets or Raid drives can definitely be an expensive recovery due to the complexity of these configurations.
It is important that you never run utilities such as scandisk, Norton disk doctor or any other such utility on a drive you suspect has a hardware failure. This can make recovery of your data difficult if not impossible in some cases. These software tools work best on simpler types of problems and have no way of dealing with hardware issues. If your data is important, and you have doubts on what to do, call a professional. Also beware of technicians running these tools without your knowledge, as the results can be just as deadly.
When a data recovery company receives your drive, if it is possible and the drive is operational, a copy of your data is made sector by sector onto another drive, so that your data is not harmed in any way. This prevents mistakes, and allows the engineer to run utilities and make changes to a copy of your drive only and not the original.
Hard drives these days are worse than ever. You may find this a surprising statement, but it is true. Due to slimmer margins, and high competition, manufacturers are making drives as inexpensively as possible and more failures are the result. As of this moment, Fujitsu has top marks for reliability in desktop hard drives followed by IBM. In notebook drives, IBM and Toshiba have top billing. An important point to note is that Hitachi makes the absolute worst notebook drives in the industry with the highest catastrophic failure rate followed by Fujitsu. Dell has just decided to go exclusively with Hitachi now in their new notebooks, so beware!
Here is my old standby: Make believe that tomorrow when you turn your computer on that it is not going to work, and what is it that you want today that you will have to do without tomorrow! Back it up!
As an aside, recently on a trip to Fry's I purchased what I thought was a Maxtor drive in a Maxtor box with a Maxtor picture. Upon opening the box, I discovered it was a Quantum drive! I called them and complained to them that this was a deceiving packaging and marketing practice and I threatened them with a press release about it. I told them that they should at least put a sticker on the box telling people that it was a Quantum drive inside. While they agreed that it was deceptive, they said go ahead and make the press release! Unbelievable.
Witten by:
Mark Cooper
President of Drive Service Company
09-2001
This is a copywritten work, and may be reproduced with permission
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Drive Service Company
3303 Harbor Blvd. E-7
Costa Mesa, CA 92626-1520
Ph. 714-549-3475
Toll Free 888-272-8332
http://www.driveservice.com
info@driveservice.com
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