data recovery further options

Jet-Fighter7700

Jet-Fighter7700

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Hi all;

just throwing this out there; maybe there's more options available to me;

recently I sent my busted 3.5'' 1TB drive to southbit data recovery;

while I can commend their work,prices and relatively quick service

Im a bit concerned with what they advise,
they cant recover my drive due to it being a f3 architecture and
having suffered a major head crash, they say they tried replacing the broken heads but the drive wont initialise
they say the top platter is fine, but the platters underneath suffered way to much damage to be recoverable;

so no charge.... but my client isn't too happy with this;

they had their entire store database on this drive,

recovery at ANY, and I mean ANY Cost is needed,

Im sure south-bit did everything they could, but I just want to explore what other options are available to me?

who do the SAPS/Hawks use to recover drives that been in fires? underwater? or blown apart in explosions?

can anybody recommend anybody else I should check with?
 
A fire/water damaged drive is much easier to recover than one that has suffered a head crash. Where's your client's backup?
 
[XC] Oj101;15470866 said:
A fire/water damaged drive is much easier to recover than one that has suffered a head crash. Where's your client's backup?
Click to expand...

no backup; this was a backup drive external that was fried.....
 
[XC] Oj101;15470866 said:
A fire/water damaged drive is much easier to recover than one that has suffered a head crash. Where's your client's backup?
Click to expand...

no backup; this was a backup drive external that was fried.....
 
My sympathies.

After this, the only options are no options. Some labs and governments have tools that check each and every magnetic packet (ie bit) by sector and track, and can recover anything if there's no deep physical damage to ferrous oxide film. It can take several months and cost over a million dollars. I last saw that a good many years ago at IBM's Hursley labs in England.

Reading between the lines, I suspect the day will dawn within twelve hours when your customer's CEO must take full personal responsibility for her/his carelessness and neglect of a vital business asset. To have only one working copy of vital business data is seriously negligent. At least four is the absolute minimum - the live set and three backups, with one offsite and secure. If it's a public company he should probably lose his job. Everyone knows machines fail. To ignore the risks by not making adequate provision to minimize them is serious dereliction of duty. And that duty starts at the very top, and rolls downhill from there.

If you're not implicated, you will certainly have the opportunity to sell him a decent commercial-grade backup and DR system, ideally with a cloud component. Good luck.
 
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I doubt that anyone else will be able to recover it but you can try tecleo or imperative.
 
Arthur said:
After this, the only options are no options. Some labs and governments have tools that check each and every magnetic packet (ie bit) by sector and track, and can recover anything if there's no deep physical damage to ferrous oxide film. It can take several months and cost over a million dollars. I last saw that a good many years ago at IBM's Hursley labs in England.
Click to expand...
I have heard about this lab too. Loooong time ago. It was possible, as recording method was strictly fixed over the entire surface and sectors had 1:1 relationship with logical disk structure. Today to successfuly read data you have to:

1. Decode it correctly. Each track is written using different parameters; start of the track, number of sectors, ECC lenght or optimal read parameters (so called taps for digital filter) are stored in the firmware data area. If you don't know starting position (offset) of the track, number of combinations increase dramaticaly, as reading will fail even having correct filter taps if the offset is wrong. Trying all possible combinations takes time, but your time is running out as heads are gathering dust when flying over damaged areas. I heard data recovery stories that improper platter reassembly after cleaning (which changes offset between two platters) or replacing spindle motor makes data completely unreadable in typical DR centre.

2. Map physical sectors to the logical structure of the disk. You have no use of data if you don't know where data belongs to. This is another problem as manufacturers try to hide how much reliability is sacrificed for a profit and decided to enter data-recovery market themselves. Read stories how reliability decreased since Barracuda 7200.11 has entered the market.

F3 architecture has at least 3-layers of mapping and third-party professional utilities do not deal with all types of firmware faillures.

OP did mention two factors: damaged media and problems with F3 architecture. If the later factor is decisive, then the factory or authorised data recovery centre might have better luck. I wouldn't try anyone by a chance. There are not many specialists who are very good in repairing firmware, even in authorised DR centres.
 
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Thanks for all the help guys,

Phoned around, seems southbit and techleo guys know each other,

My story is platter damage, apparently my bottom platters are just too damaged to allow my drive to initialze,

They said they replaced my drive-heads and tried again, just advise nothing more they can do....
Say its too damaged to be able to do a recovery

Spoke to techleo, says pretty much the same thing, platter damage cannot under ANY circumstances be fixed, how true is this?

Any other labs I should try?
Am getting the broken drive shipped back to me here in Jhb, anybody willing to try pm me,

My client has deep pockets, and needs this data badly.....

Can take it as a challenge :D
 
eg2505 said:
Thanks for all the help guys,

Phoned around, seems southbit and techleo guys know each other,

My story is platter damage, apparently my bottom platters are just too damaged to allow my drive to initialze,

They said they replaced my drive-heads and tried again, just advise nothing more they can do....
Say its too damaged to be able to do a recovery

Spoke to techleo, says pretty much the same thing, platter damage cannot under ANY circumstances be fixed, how true is this?

Any other labs I should try?
Am getting the broken drive shipped back to me here in Jhb, anybody willing to try pm me,

My client has deep pockets, and needs this data badly.....

Can take it as a challenge :D
Click to expand...

You not gonna come right I'm afraid.
 
There is nothing left there to recover dude.

Maybe you can contact the CIA or NCIS?
 
Platter damage means that the heads (most likely - or some other physical part) have made contact with the discs themselves. That causes deep gouges in the the platter and even if there is some data there to recover, huge chunks of it will be missing. Meaning that a complete rewrite of the data will be necessary anyway.
 
Garyvdh said:
Platter damage means that the heads (most likely - or some other physical part) have made contact with the discs themselves. That causes deep gouges in the the platter and even if there is some data there to recover, huge chunks of it will be missing. Meaning that a complete rewrite of the data will be necessary anyway.
Click to expand...

So its true then?

Even the nsa can't help me?
The drive is well and truly fuk*ed?

One other question, when companies destroy your data purposefully that is,

Do they do something similar, or just put the drive through a giant paper shredder that shreds everything, platters, heads, casing, board. Everything....

Is there a way to actually program a drive to "break" itself like mine did?
I mean if they want to independitly audit a drive is destroyed, they scratch the platters so its impossible to recover?
 
eg2505 said:
So its true then?

Even the nsa can't help me?
The drive is well and truly fuk*ed?

One other question, when companies destroy your data purposefully that is,

Do they do something similar, or just put the drive through a giant paper shredder that shreds everything, platters, heads, casing, board. Everything....

Is there a way to actually program a drive to "break" itself like mine did?
I mean if they want to independitly audit a drive is destroyed, they scratch the platters so its impossible to recover?
Click to expand...

best way to destroy a HDD with sensitive info is to melt it. So same way metal is recycled. 2 birds with one stone.
 
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