Data Recovery Blog

When you're not confident with something... STOP! - you'll only make it worse

A few times each month we'll see a hard drive, or sometimes a server, that will come in for data recovery that someone has had a bit of a go at first... This may be a mate, a family friend, a PC shop, a specialist IT company, or even another 'data recovery' company...

We have a hard drive in this week that has had it's top lid removed. The screws that secure this lid are specialist ones - you need an exact type of difficult-to-get-hold-of screwdriver to open the lid, but this drive has had its screws modified by a hacksaw so that a conventional screwdriver will work... (see picture here) Why? So they can take the top off... Why? So they can look inside the drive and see... What? What do they expect to see? What do they expect to be able to do? Under this lid is a clean air environment that allows the drive to operate... once the top is off that environment is lost... and then there are the fingerprints that were all over the surfaces too...

Same story with a server unfortunately... It was running a company accounts and invoicing system. It failed on a Thursday afternoon. The company had their own in-house IT person and then various IT 'specialists' look at the system and attempt to get it back up and running. They contacted us on the following Tuesday and they bought the server in. What was originally a straight forward problem with their RAID controller had not been spotted, and their system had had 3 of the hard drives replaced (why?), had been reformatted (why?), had Windows reloaded (why?) and finally rebuilt (why?). With this type of problem the data should have been completely recoverable, unfortunately it was totally unrecoverable because the people looking at the system before it got to us did not have a clue what they were doing.

We've been in data recovery since 2002, there is a reason we are still going - we are GOOD at what we do...
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