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Data Clinic's Advanced Data Recovery (ADR) services

Background: Data Clinic's ADR service is used to recover data from hard drives when conventional methods of data recovery have failed. It has already achieved some notable successes. Partly funded by the Department of Trade & Industry, our ADR services involve Data Clinic UK, Data Clinic Italy, the Manchester Metropolitan University (from whom we have a research graduate) and GCubic srl (hardware component specialists)

Media: External enclosure from a SUN system containing an 18Gb SCSI hard disk running Solaris 5.2
Recovery: The data on this drive was successfully recovered.
Recovery Time: 10 weeks

Symptoms: The drive was recognised infrequently, and when it was recognised, only a few sectors of data could be accessed before read errors became apparent & the drive halted. Upon examination, the accessed data was somtimes corrupted.

Summary: Detailed investigation showed that the drive's electronic circuitry was fine, and that the service and data areas of the disk were also ok. Various monitoring tests were performed & a vibration test revealed higher than expected levels which were traced to the bearings in the hard drive motor. Further tests on the motor showed that excessive heat was being produced which in turn was causing the drive to fail. Using detailed monitoring and control equipment we were able to find a temperature range in which the drive would function correctly. The drive was put into a custom built housing were we were able to monitor and adjust the operating temperature of the drive. The data was then successfully read from the drive onto another hard disk.

Examination of the recovered data showed that files under 128K were ok, but some larger that 128K had become corrupted.

Investigation of the data from corrupted files > 128K showed a uniform corruption. Two custom Linux scripts were written:
a) The first script identified all the files on the hard disk with this data corruption & moved both the uncorrupted and corrupted data parts to a repair directory.
b) The second script parsed each file and repaired the corrupted area. Once corrected, this data was written back to the original file, which then functioned correctly.

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For conventional data recovery methods to work the hard drive in question must still retain some degree of correct functionality.
When the problems are not easily solved and conventional methods have failed it's time to consider the ADR option.