The notes you made about you disk are read and interpreted to help us understand whether the issue is logical or physical. If the issue is probably logical, your disk is immediately cloned to a hard drive we know is in perfect working order. This ensures that when we get to work trying to put your file system back in order, that we don’t aggravate any latent physical or hardware issues with the disk you sent in. Many recovery companies don’t bother doing this because it does take a long time and just adds another step to the recovery process. Anyone that you deal with should be able to promise you that this step will occur and that they know how to do it properly. Cloning is a must. The next time you power on the disk could be its last to work properly!

If the issue seems to be physical or hardware based (from reading your comments about the disk), we will do a disk inspection before spinning the drive up in an attempt to clone it. We will check the circuit boards, the power supply the internals (read/write heads, spindle, head actuator) and the platters – all in a clean room environment. One key thing we are looking for is a head crash. Not only will we check the surface of the platters for damage but will check the pillows (filters) under a microscope for any indication of magnetic coating on the filter. If we see any indication of a head crash – the process stops there and the disk is carefully put back together so we can advise you to go with an advanced recovery. We will never jeopardize your chances of recovery by trying to resolve a head crash here at DriveFish. That is not a job for us but rather our partner DriveSavers.  Read more here about why this is important.

If there is no indication of a head crash we will solve the electronics or motor problem(s) if present, put the disk back together and attempt to clone the drive. The point is we never will just sit there powering your drive up and down trying to get it to mount. It is very important to take powering a malfunctioning drive very seriously – and at DriveFish we do just that! This ensures that regardless of whether we collect a fee, you can count on us to ensure your best chance of recovery.

Please don’t fall victim to this! Be sure you have a clear view of all prices and markups before doing business. Be sure you ask the right questions. We have seen “estimates” for single volume disks without massive hardware issues totaling over $9500. Luckilly, that customer opted out and sent the drive to us. If you want to be taken care of without the hassle, give us a call.

Generally most of our favorite Live CDs are flavors of Linux. This is great because with Linux you have an array of great free pieces of software that can be used to aid in your recovery. Try Knoppix or nUbuntu to get started! Simply download the .iso and burn the image to disk. Then drop it in your CD/DVD drive, set the machine to boot from CD and turn on the power! This frees your hard drives to allow complete access!

Drivesavers main focus is data recovery:

Ontrack has a law forensics department as well as many others. While this is cool and interesting, Drivesavers on the other hand do data recovery and data recovery only. They have been in business since 1985 and have always been a leader in advanced recovery. We like the idea of a company built from the ground up with one focus – helping people recover data.

Drivesavers will waive the assessment fee for DriveFish customers:

Ontrack charges $100 to just look at the disk, even if they are unable to recover anything from it. This was very important to us and is a really good faith effort on Drivesavers part to do business with our clients. People come to us for assurance that they will get the job done for the most reasonable fee. Drivesavers helps us achieve that goal.

Drivesavers has amazing customer service:

Not that Kroll doesn’t have good service, but Drivesavers stands out heads above the rest. The are incredibly friendly, helpful and easy to work with. Thats the way we do business and we expect our partners to do the same.

We have been happy with the relationship for a long time now and know that our customers appreciate the partnership and the advantages it offers them.

We received a disk from a teacher in Texas who had been told by another firm they could do the recovery for $199. Because the company was in Dallas the teacher tried in good faith to do business locally. When they received his disk he waited over a week for a call claiming that the recovery was more advanced that previously thought. He told them he had received a firm price of $199 and couldn’t afford more than that. When he asked them to send the disk back, they claimed there was a $100 “fee” for diagnosing the drive. Their diagnosis was that the “motor had failed” and that they would need around $700 for parts PLUS the $199 he was quoted. When he refused to pay the “fee” that he was never told about they tried to KEEP his hard drive as ransom! It took threats to the “owner” of the company and 2 certified letters to get the disk back – and only then after agreeing to split the fee and pay them $50. When we received the disk it was covered in stickers with this companies logo on it and a big red X written in permanent marker on the case. Expecting to have to replace the motor, the disk was disasembled and prepared for a motor swap. We found that the motor was working perfectly! The disk was put back together, cloned and within a few hours We completed a full recovery.

A nice girl who was in class at the University of Colorado at Boulder sent us a submission previously sent to another company who lowballed the price and tried to raise it to $2200 once she sent it in. While they gave her no problems when she opted out, when she received the disk she claimed there were DENTS in the case that werent there before. She called us in a panic: “Can they do that?” We of course arent sure they DID but wow – to think they might have tried to damage the disk before sending it back! There were significant hardware issues with the drive but we managed to set her up with all of her lost files – including one key research paper!

Another customer sent us a disk with an email that had us laughing for days. It was a copy of the “diagnosis” from her initial choice of recovery companies. We hear technical double-speak all the time. Companies will use it to confuse the customer and make them think the issue is severely technical and over their heads. This reduces the likelihood that the customer will ask questions or want answers. This techno-jabber however, took the cake:

“…unstable causation unit allowing intermittent access, furthermore causing read errors/logical problems, affecting file system structures within the static loader, etc.  We need to manually rebuild the seeker corridor and decompile corrupted file-system components, adjust file pointers by at least 10 degrees and mount the recovered volume(s) before retrieving data.”

Naturally they tried to raise the price and she opted out. When we received the drive, there were no real issues and we completed a full recovery for her. There definitely wasn’t any trouble with the “static loader” !

We have had a few customers whos disks were LOST. Literally. One account stands out because of how flagrant the negligence was. A computer tech sent a clients disk in to a fly by night company he found on the web with an air carrier and tracking number. The disk was delivered and he even received an email from the company confirming this. After a week or so he wrote in asking about the progress and got no response. It took him another week to finally get a response saying they had “misplaced” his disk and were looking for it. He finally got fed up and demanded answers. They claimed that it had never been delivered. When confromted with the tracking number they said it must have accidentally been thrown away. Finally the guy got a call from ANOTHER recovery company claiming they had his disk, had managed a partial recovery and wanted a credit card number as payment. His disk had been outsourced without his knowledge and he was kept totally in the dark! He was more fortunate than some others whos disks were never found. After he paid the company who called him, he received a bill a few days later for over twice the price from the company who lost his disk! When he had need for another recovery, he called us with this story. We promised him he would never have the same problem with us and he has been a great customer ever since.

Be careful who you do business with!

Do they have transparent pricing?
Pricing should be completely transparent to the customer. What this means is that before ever sending the disk in, the customer should be fully aware of any costs associated with the recovery. Many firms will try things like giving an “estimate” or saying “in most cases”. With just a few details, they should be able to tell you the same thing we can: “This is how much it is going to cost.” In our case – this fee is always $199.

Do they answer the phone?
Or even have a phone number? You should be able to communicate fully with the company you choose in your choice of formats. If you like to write long handwritten letters, they should write you back. If you like to talk on the phone, they should answer! We can be reached easily at 866-DRIVEFISH (866-374-8334).

Do they outsource? If so with who? Is this transparent to the customer?
This is very important. We have heard of disks being LOST because of rampant outsourcing. If the company you choose plans to outsource, you need to be kept fully in the loop and confirm each and every decision made about the movements of your data.

What if you don’t have the money? Will they offer advice on trying the recovery yourself?
Most of the “other guys” think we are absolutely nuts for doing this. You should never do business with a company who wont answer any question you may have or won’t offer advice if you want to move forward on your own. Information is free. We don’t make money by knowing these things. We make money by doing these things, better than anyone else.

Sometimes more than double! This is a common tactic of some of the data recovery “firms” you will notice while searching for a service provider. They will advertise a low price to gain your business but once you send the disk in – the “problem” with your disk suddenly becomes more complex, the fee goes WAY up, and you are left trying to decide what to do. Unfortunately, many people fall for this tactic and end up paying ridiculous sums for the service. To make matter worse, many of these firms don’t even DO data recovery. They don’t know anything about data recovery. They are simply doubling the price of a reputable advanced recovery company like Drivesavers and outsourcing without your knowledge!

We commonly get disks that have first been sent to companies like this. In most cases they are sent with an email relating the horror story of the experience. The low price, the price hike, having to wait to have the disk shipped back to them because they couldn’t afford the fee etc. We have seen price tags OVER $9000!! Our engineers can only shake their heads while doing a full recovery on that same disk for $199.

While we aren’t going to get into names, we do hope that you will do your research before choosing a data recovery company. Regardless of whether you choose DriveFish, we hope you will call or write with any questions or comments. We will be happy to assist you!

The fact is, most of them are the same basic functions with a different GUI. Going a step further, most of them are performing functions available for free in an open source piece of software. Why use open source instead of a software that costs money? Not only can you be sure exactly what an open source piece of software is doing, but it’s also free! As well, there is generally a good size community of users that are willing to discuss solutions and problems with the code.

Warning: Before moving forward with any self-recovery, please be aware you can easily make the disk COMPLETELY UNRECOVERABLE if you move forward without knowing what you are doing (and in some cases when you do). If the data is worth less that $199 to you feel free to try some of these suggestions. If the data is worth $199, don’t mess around with your chances. Power the drive down, pack it up and send it to us. Now without further annoying warnings, here is the best data recovery software available:

The Winner and Still Champion

Antonio Diaz’s GNU dd_rescue. This software can copy a failing drive to a new disk – giving you a better chance of recovery because you will be working on a disk that is not failing. This is an important step and one of the first steps DriveFish takes when recovering data. Imagine you have a hard drive that is failing (you know it has bad blocks, is making noise, giving CRC errors etc). With dd_rescue you can copy all of the data in RAW mode from the bad disk to a working one – which you can then work with to try and reconstruct your data. This way, you arent constantly spinning the bad drive and reducing your chances of recovery. Copy the disk using ddrescue to a working disk for your best chance of success!

It’s important to mention, dd_rescue is very different from ddrescue and dd. dd_rescue is authored by Antonio Diaz, is GNU and is more functional and safer than the other titles. In our experience we have never lost a single byte to a bug in ddrescue. To describe what this software does, we’ll use the description from the author:

“GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. GNU ddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps. The basic operation of GNU ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you use the logfile feature of GNU ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.”

One of the coolest things about this software is the logfile feature – allowing you to resume a failed copy and tweak down on troubled sectors.

You can find this wonderful software here.

How to use it?

Installation

Debian Linux:
# apt-get install ddrescue

RedHat Linux:
# yum -y install ddrescue

Installs as /usr/bin/ddrescue

Example:

To copy /dev/sda (damaged \device\harddisk0) to another drive /dev/sdb (empty \device\harddisk1)

# ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

To recover the partition data run fsck, for example if /home (user data) is on /dev/sda2, run fsck on partition /dev/sdb2:
# fsck /dev/sdb2

This avoids touching the damaged /dev/sda, if the procedure fails you can send the original disk to us.

Lastly mount the partition somewhere and see if you can access the data:
# mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/data

Honorable Mentions

Testdisk, Photorec and pdisk are all present in our engineers collections. Click the software titles to read more about them.