Posts Tagged ‘Technology’

What to do in case of a drive emergency

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

In the event of problems with a hard drive, you are always flirting with data loss. Here are a few simple rules to determine what your next step should be:

Scenario 1: You hear a drive making unusual clicking and/or grinding noises.
Steps to take: Stop using the drive immediately. Whenever a drive produces these kinds of sounds, you’re risking that the heads are scraping over the platters (called “scoring”) which will make it impossible to read any data off the drive. Call the Data Rescue Center immediately!

Scenario 2: A drive is no longer recognized by the computer and doesn’t show up on the computer at all or only very intermittently. The motor inside the drive is spinning, however, and does not produce and unusual sounds.
Steps to take: Very likely a failure of the drive’s electronics, however the data can usually be fully recovered. Any drive that does not show up at all on a computer despite seemingly working fine can typically not be recovered by the user. Please call the Data Rescue Center for a free evaluation of the drive.

Scenario 3: A drive is showing unreliable behavior. It occasionally seems to freeze when accessing data, but does get recognized properly by the computer.
Steps to take: In a situation where a drive shows some inexplicable, seemingly random behavior, this points to the drive having many bad blocks or a weakness of one or more of the read/write heads. You should copy important data off this drive ASAP and replace the drive.

Scenario 4: Data has been accidentally deleted from the drive, or the drive has been formatted or partitioned by mistake, causing data stored previously on this drive to be gone.
Steps to take: Do not write any new data to this drive, as this will make a full recovery impossible. All these actions mentioned have so far only affected the Table Of Contents on the drive, the actual data is still there and can be recovered with a software package like Data Rescue. By not allowing any new data being written to the drive you prevent that your old data is being overwritten and gone for good, because once new data is written over your data, it can never be brought back.

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Monitoring your drives just got a little easier

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

With the release of Drive Genius 3 on the Mac, a new feature was added that makes monitoring your drives a lot easier: DrivePulse®! Using DrivePulse®, whenever the system is inactive for a period of time, it will check your drives for potential problems, making use of the S.M.A.R.T. technology in today’s drives (S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), as well as fragmentation status, temperature, and other items.

While this monitoring will not necessarily alert you exactly when your drive is about to fail (something that isn’t really possible anyway, just like predicting volcano eruptions or earthquakes: you know it will happen, but can’t be sure when), it gives you some good indicators about the health of the drive and when it might me a good idea for a backup.

If you have a Mac and are looking for a universal drive utility, check out the brand new Drive Genius 3.

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Data Recovery on an iPhone? Is it possible?

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

If you lost data on an iPhone, i.e. you deleted pictures by mistake that you didn’t sync yet with your computer, can those pictures be recovered? The answer is a clear “it depends”.

As the iPhone (and consequently the iPod Touch and now also the new iPad) are part of Apple’s closed ecosystem, you as the user don’t have full access to the file system and – more importantly – cannot read or write directly to the flash memory where all your information is stored. In addition, any app on your iPhone is “sandboxed” and doesn’t have full access to the file system, let alone direct flash memory access, and thus cannot check for your deleted data, which is why there cannot be a tool like Data Rescue (which we offer for the Mac or PC) on the iPhone.

What happens when you delete information on your iPhone (similar to a regular hard drive), the entry in the file system is removed and the part on the flash memory that holds the actual information is added to the pool of free space, ready to be overwritten again by any kind of data. So even normal use, for example if you browse the web on your iPhone with Safari, the temporary files that get generated could already irrevocably overwrite the data you would like to get back.

Does that mean no data recovery is possible on iPhones? If you have the iPhone 3GS with the latest software installed, sadly, there is currently no known way to recover that data. If you’re using an older iPhone or haven’t updated your 3GS to the latest software, it may be possible to perform a function called “jailbreaking”, which would allow us to install certain software that in turn gives us direct access to the flash memory, and thus potentially recover the data you are after.

Realistically, however, the chances of actually finding your deleted data is fairly slim, especially if your device is more or less full with your data (music, videos, photos), as the chances of your lost data not being overwritten through normal operation tend to become zero quite quickly.

As a rule of thumb (just like for any other data loss scenario): if you have deleted data on your iDevice that had not been backed up, stop using it immediately and give us a call, so we can assess the situation and review your options.

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The 4K Sector Transition

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

A change is coming into the hard drive market place this year, after planning has been going on for about a decade or so. The change in question? Raising the size of hard drive sectors from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes, or 4KB. Why is this important, and why should you care?

First some background about what’s going on: the main reason for raising the amount of data a single sector can hold is to improve efficiency (and therefore speed), as well as support for even larger hard drives. You see, the storage capacity of hard drives has increased immensely year over year, but the way the data is organized on the platters has not kept pace. And there are good reasons why the organizational side hasn’t changed the same way, even though the manufacturers were aware that they would be running into issues eventually and needed to do something about it.

The problem with smaller sector sizes that basically every hard drive up to 2010 used is that they are increasingly inefficient. The data stored on hard disks isn’t just your actual data, but also overhead that enables important functionality like error correction, without which you couldn’t rely on your data being stored correctly. Going from 512 byte sectors to 4KB sectors allows better and more efficient error correction algorithms to be used, which will result in higher speeds, but also increases capacity of the drives, as more of the drive space can be used for user data, and less for error correction.

Now this all sounds very good and reasonable, but what’s the catch? As alluded to, some older OSes and applications cannot properly deal with these new 4K sector drives, the most popular one being Windows XP. So if you haven’t upgraded to Windows Vista or Windows 7 yet, you might want to avoid getting one of these new drives (Macintosh users running Tiger or higher are not affected). You can find some helpful general information from Western Digital about these new drives, or if you would like to get the nitty-gritty technical background, head on over to AnandTech.

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Of internal and external drives

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

As a data recovery company, our data recovery experts get to see a lot of drives on a daily basis, and there are hundreds of models out there. Here are a couple of key aspects that help categorize drives.

One obvious factor is the physical size of the drive. While other sizes exist, we are typically seeing desktop drives (3.5”) and laptop drives (2.5”). Desktop drives can currently hold up to 2TB in capacity, while laptop drives have just reached the 1TB barrier.

The second big aspect is whether it is an internal or an external hard drive. A lot of people don’t realize that an external hard drive is in fact just a housing, a case for an internal hard drive, equipped with interfaces like USB or FireWire to be able to connect the drive to a computer externally.

Here it is important to know that the makers of external drives are not necessarily the makers of the actual drive mechanism inside. What this means is that unless you’re buying an external drive from one of the big drive manufacturers (i.e. Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, or Western Digital), the actual hard drive inside is not actually from the maker of the case (e.g. LaCie, SimpleTech or G-Data to name but a few), but typically from one of the big four mentioned above.

This is important in a harddrive recovery scenario, as the problem is in most cases not with the enclosure, but with the drive mechanism inside. As such, if a problematic external drive comes to us, we will have to remove it from the enclosure, in order to be able to test the actual hard drive. Unfortunately, most external drives made by the drives manufacturers themselves nowadays come in cases that cannot be opened without leaving marks or even rendering them useless after opening.

Finally, the last major point of distinction that needs to be mentioned is the interface used by the drives. For the last few years, basically all new drives shipped with the SATA (serial ATA) connector. If a drive is older than that, chances are it is still sporting the PATA (parallel ATA, also known as IDE) connector. While the SATA connector is the same on both 2.5” and 3.5” drives, laptop drives carry a smaller variant of the IDE connector compared to their desktop cousins, which means an adapter may be necessary to connect them internally to a desktop computer.

If you have an empty enclosure or want to replace a drive in an enclosure you own, it is therefore important to know which interface the case supports, as it will only support one of the two. If your case supports the IDE interface but you buy a SATA drive, you will not be able to mount the drive in your case and will have to get a different case (one that supports SATA) instead, and vice versa.

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Seagate Firmware troubles still out there

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

When Seagate’s Barracuda series 7200.11 was first released, the firmware had a bug that could render your drive inoperable. Any time the drive went to sleep or the computer was shut off, there was a chance that the drive would not get back to a “ready state” and properly accept commands. At that point there is no way to get to your data without specialized tools.

As data recovery experts we still get requests about these drives and to help recover the data. This means that if you have one of these Seagate drives, take the time to check that you have the latest firmware on them, so that you don’t get hit by a non-responsive drive. Unless of course you like having to hand your precious data over to a data recovery specialist to get access to your data back.

Check our little info page with more information about the latest Seagate firmwares.

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