Your thoughts on hard drive recovery.

daveza

daveza

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Heres the story - and suggestions are welcome as to how to gently give this news to my client.

Her pc was built at around 15K and we added an external 500 Gig drive for her commercial photo storage.

A few months back ' it got knocked over '. Took it to the lab - irrecoverable.

So we bought an internal 500 gig.

Two days ago I received a frantic call. Her pc takes 10 minutes to boot and then she receives a message ' Access to Desktop denied ' In fact access to everything was denied.

I noticed the 500 Gig D drive was not detected in the bios so took it out ad the pc booted normally. However still no access to C drive files from the desktop.

A google advised, login in safe mode as admin, delete the user then add it again which I did , selecting ' keep the user files '. However before deleting the user I set security to allow me access to her user profile - there were no files !

Reboot into the newly created profile and all is normal except no files in the old ' saved user files'.

So off to the lab with the 500g D drive. I'm thinking the drive is only a few months old, it is spinning and doesn't seem to have mechanical failure.

Quote received this morning - electro-mechanical failure. 70% chance of recovery. Cost R 6000 ex vat ! This does not include cost of a new 500g drive for the recovered files.

Here's the kicker. The drive is under warranty so I can have it swapped out - but then the supplier keeps the drive.

If I choose to let the lab rebuild the drive then I cannot then swap it as the warranty no longer applies.

Something about this seems remarkably unfair.
 
If she's got her photos backed up then scrap the drive and get her a new one - if not then data recovery is her only option. I would suppose opening the drive for recovery voids any warranty and is therefore out of the labs hands.

IMO - if they had built her a system with a redundant backup everything would have been fine. Lots of photographers (in particular) are using a Drobo. http://www.drobo.com/
 
The D drive was the back-up drive.

The originals were in My Docs on C ..... which seems to have corrupted itself.

PS: Thanks - will look at the Drobo, but it's just another device which can fail no ?

Do we really need to be making backups of our backed up backups ?
 
daveza said:
The D drive was the back-up drive.

The originals were in My Docs on C ..... which seems to have corrupted itself.
Click to expand...
So the main drive got corrupted and at the same time drive D failed? Unfortunate coincidence.
 
Sorry to hear this - you did everything you could to help your client, but Mr Murphy was most insistent this time...

@ bwana - thanks for the drobo link - it sounds very promising.
 
daveza said:
The D drive was the back-up drive.

The originals were in My Docs on C ..... which seems to have corrupted itself.

PS: Thanks - will look at the Drobo, but it's just another device which can fail no ?

Do we really need to be making backups of our backed up backups ?
Click to expand...

bwana said:
So the main drive got corrupted and at the same time drive D failed? Unfortunate coincidence.
Click to expand...

How is the power supply at the client? Is it reasonably stable, or is it spiking? Spiking can also cause hard drive problems to surface.

It can also be a bug on the motherboard - visit the manufacturer's site to see if it can support 500Gb SATA reliably.
 
bwana said:
So the main drive got corrupted and at the same time drive D failed? Unfortunate coincidence.
Click to expand...

And I need to explain this....

To top it all the pc runs through a UPS so I can't even use the power-spike story.

At best I will have to convince her that somehow the failure of the D drive affected the system files on C. Possible ?
 
The_Librarian said:
How is the power supply at the client? Is it reasonably stable, or is it spiking? Spiking can also cause hard drive problems to surface.

It can also be a bug on the motherboard - visit the manufacturer's site to see if it can support 500Gb SATA reliably.
Click to expand...

She does have a rather iffy electrical situation where the pc is - but the UPS should have protected it no ?

( Although I have had a power spike take out a power supply on the other end of a ups so perhaps it's not failproof).
 
daveza said:
The D drive was the back-up drive.

The originals were in My Docs on C ..... which seems to have corrupted itself.

PS: Thanks - will look at the Drobo, but it's just another device which can fail no ?

Do we really need to be making backups of our backed up backups ?
Click to expand...
The drobo is pretty impressive. Sort of like a Raid but you can use any drives you have lying around and it self heals.
 
A long shot - should I try EasyRecovery on the C drive ?

Perhaps her My Docs are still there but Windows has lost the plot ?
 
Pop in a Ubuntu live cd and see if you can access the files on the C drive.
 
I'll bet my clangers we're talking about a seagate 500Gb drive here...
 
daveza said:
That's the one....
Click to expand...

These 500Gb Seagates seem to be disasters - must have been a whole run of them with manufacturing faults. Do a search here at the forum - the damn things are failing left, right & centre.
 
Tell your client that the 500Gb Seagate had a manufacturing fault.

I dunno how you will explain the messed-up C: drive.
 
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