Q.
A. You could start off with just cheap generic hardware and outsource the difficult stuff (damaged hardware that needs platters mounted in a cleanbox)
A SATA/IDE to USB adapter would let you mount customer disks without having to reboot all the time.
You'd want to do a non-destructive disk image to a good device then work on the disk image not the broken device, so you'd want several large good-quality disks to copy images to.
For SD cards, you'd want USB card adapters and mini/micro adapters.
Floppy disk drives, maybe (does anyone still use those?)
Linux "dd" is good for imaging drives, and "photorec" seems good for recovering photos & certain other files (that have defined headers/metadata).
Once you have disk images, you can try different recovery tools on different O/S without risking the original. A VM environment might help.
You'd want to protect your equipment from the customer's drives, somehow, if you can - maybe separate power supplies if you use SATA directly, maybe add current meters/limiters. I seemed to damage a couple of cheap USB/SATA adapters somehow trying to read a bad drive, even though it seemed to work OK for a while and had in fact been OK on the original PC apart from some damaged sectors.
A SATA/IDE to USB adapter would let you mount customer disks without having to reboot all the time.
You'd want to do a non-destructive disk image to a good device then work on the disk image not the broken device, so you'd want several large good-quality disks to copy images to.
For SD cards, you'd want USB card adapters and mini/micro adapters.
Floppy disk drives, maybe (does anyone still use those?)
Linux "dd" is good for imaging drives, and "photorec" seems good for recovering photos & certain other files (that have defined headers/metadata).
Once you have disk images, you can try different recovery tools on different O/S without risking the original. A VM environment might help.
You'd want to protect your equipment from the customer's drives, somehow, if you can - maybe separate power supplies if you use SATA directly, maybe add current meters/limiters. I seemed to damage a couple of cheap USB/SATA adapters somehow trying to read a bad drive, even though it seemed to work OK for a while and had in fact been OK on the original PC apart from some damaged sectors.
How can I get data from a damaged external hard drive?
Q. I have a 250gb I/O Magic external drive that seems to have a damaged USB port. My computer recognizes the hardware when I plug in the USB but it rarely sees the drive letter. Sometimes it shows up in "my computer" but it doesn't stay there. It also freezes up my machine when it is connected but everything returns to normal once I unplug the USB cable. Any ideas?
A. You can still get the data off of the drive it just may be a little more complex because some drives run a linux backend that controls the partitioning information and makes recovery a little more difficult. First you need to determine if it is just the USB port that is damaged or if the HDD is physically failing. Visually inspect the port on the drive and see if it has bent pins or if it is loose. If the port is damaged you can usually take apart the drive enclosure and remove the drive and hook it up to the bus on your computer. After you have the drive hooked up you can run some data recovery programs like Recuva or you can go to ontrack.com and they have some trial software that will look and see if any of the data is recoverable. If the drive is physically failing you may have to send it off to a clean room to have the data recovered which can be really expensive. Some of the drives I have sent to recovery have been over $1000 to get the data back. If you determine that the drive is failing and is still in warranty, I would call the manufacturer of the drive to see if they offer any sort of discounted recovery services. Good luck!
will deleting a single mirror volume caused the other irrecoverable as well?
Q. hi,
i have accidentally clicked on delete on a volume, but unfortunately without realizing it will delete the other mirror volume as well. i am wondering is there any quick way to retrieve back the other volume without going through the data recovery route? the volumes are dynamic disk and running on win7.
i have accidentally clicked on delete on a volume, but unfortunately without realizing it will delete the other mirror volume as well. i am wondering is there any quick way to retrieve back the other volume without going through the data recovery route? the volumes are dynamic disk and running on win7.
A. You can try Runtime RAID Recovery for Windows. It support both Hardware and Software RAID.
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