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!

If you want to order online, here are some good prices:

The only thing you need to be concered with when buying is the connection type of your hard drive.  Generally they are either SATA or PATA (IDE). You need to buy the type that supports your type of hard drive.

PATA (IDE) is on the top, SATA is on the bottom.

Once you connect your disk, simply plug the USB cable into your computer to access (or attempt to access!) the data.

“Dude just toss it in the freezer for a couple of hours!! Worked for me!!”

Ok, first – we doubt it worked for you. We bet instead you read this advice somewhere and rehashed it to look like you knew what you were talking about. In reality, freezing your drive is NOT a good idea. You can create condensation (we all know hard drives like water) and can literally cause a head crash (when the read/write heads actually touch the spinning platters = no data for you).  Please, please..don’t put your disk in the freezer.

You can accomplish the same thing by cooling the drive. This is much easier on the parts of the disk and can be accomplished without moisture condensation. If you can keep the disk around 70 degrees, you are doing well.

The biggest problem we have with submitted disks is that the user has tried to hack their way through a recovery before they send the disk in. If you are unsure about your chances of recovering the data yourself, ask this simple question:

Is the data worth $199? If the answer is yes – don’t mess with the drive anymore and send it in. If the answer is no – try cooling your drive to ensure your best possible chances of recovery – but definitely don’t freeze it!

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.