Data Recovery

	Data Recovery: Case Studies 01: AAA-DataRecovery.com : 04.05.03 On Monday evening, after work, Tom Brown sat down at his computer, and turned on the screen as he sipped his latte. As the screen formed he noticed that the mouse was not responding. He scanned the screen from corner to corner, and the mouse pointer was nowhere to be found. He tried to make the machine respond by pressing various keys, but he noted that the Caps Lock key light would not light. Fortunately, he had saved his work before he quit last night, so he decided to reboot his computer. He pressed the power switch, once, then again, and again, but the computer would not turn off. He decided to call the manufacturer's support line, and after a 5-10 minute wait a friendly young technician told him that he should unplug the machine, wait a couple of minutes and then turn it on again. Thank goodness it worked. The machine rebooted with no problem, although it appeared to take longer to start than he remembered. Everything was fine for about a week, but every time he started the machine he held his breath, because he knew how precious his family pictures, resumes, and both business and personal emails were. He began to think of ways to backup this valuable information, but other things in his busy life soon distracted him, plus in the back of his mind he thought that if a failure was imminent, the young technician would have told him. Sunday morning, Tom, once again found his computer frozen. He didn't bother to call the company again, he just unplugged his computer and it restarted fine. Now he was starting to worry. He knew that his machine was under warranty, but his data was extremely precious, as he knew all to well from an excited dinner conversation, with the family about the computer problems. He decided that he would discuss the problems with the IT department at his job. On Monday he spoke with Bill Bigwood, the head of his company IT department. Bill warned him about virus, and static electricity protection, and advised him to buy a CDR to back up his data. He also tells Tom a series of procedures that may help, like disk clean-up, and virus updates. However, even after hours of work, the problems seems to be occurring with increasing frequency. Unfortunately, Tom did not have the time or experience to install the new backup CDR hardware, so he contracted with a local computer company that his friends had recommend, to come out and install the new drive. After the extremely competent technician had installed the CDR drive, he was unable to make it work. He spent a lot of time, speaking with the help line, and downloading drivers. Finally he decides that the operating system must be re-installed. He has done this many times, and feels that Tom's data will be safe during the re-install. However, Murphy's Law seems to be in full effect, and the install fails multiple times. The exasperated technician finally tries to un-install the update, but alas this fails as well. The technician has no options left. He can no longer see Tom's data, and he can't get the machine working. Tom is angry, and is beginning to doubt the technician's competence. The technician tells Tom that he will have to install a new hard drive, and operating system. Once the new drive, and operating system are installed, everything goes well, and the machine is almost as fast as it was when it was brand new. Unfortunately, the Brown family data seems lost. The technician takes the old drive back to his shop, and works at it for days, trying to resolve the problem, but to no avail, and he finally informs Tom that a specialized data recovery company may be able to help. What has happened here? When the drive was submitted for recovery, we discovered that although much of the data was intact, many portions of the drive have been so damaged that the data is only partially recoverable. After some consultation, we realized that the drive had been failing from the earliest point that the computer had begun to freeze and crash. However, most of the damage was done by the continued use of the drive, and the unprofessional recovery efforts. Luckily, for Tom, we were able to get the bulk of his data back, but the final price was almost $2,000. The important point is that drive failures are often presented as freezes or crashes. A computer that has a continuing record of unexplained problems, is most often suffering from a failing drive. This is because, when the drive begins to fail, both the drive, and the operating system try to hide this from the user. It is this process of fighting a failure that often makes the machine slow to boot, or to crash. When this occurs, backup your key data immediately, and continue to do so as long as you are still using the computer.