Data Recovery
Data Recovery
It’s difficult to know who to choose for data recovery in Barrie, or anywhere else for that matter. Many times you only get one shot at it and it can be messed up quite easily. A computer repair technician needs to be very careful in how they process the drive. As an example you don’t want data recovery software installed on the same drive you want to attempt to recover the data from. That would almost completely destroy any possibility of recovering much of the data. In such a case, much (if not all) the data can be lost due to being overwritten.
Unless the drive is mechanically damaged internally, such as clicking Western Digital hard drives (the “click of death”.. Even then we can sometimes recover data from them), we can recover data. We can even do data recovery on drives that aren’t recognized either in Windows or by the computer itself.
In what kinds of situations can we do data recovery?
- Formatted hard drives, such as factory recovery installs;
- Lost partitions. A hard drive indexes the information on the drive much like a card catalogue in a library. Sometimes this index gets lost or damaged, but the data is still on the drive. We can get it back;
- Damaged RAID arrays. Even if your RAID controller breaks, we can recover data from them. This includes RAID 0, 1 and 5 arrays;
- Computer constantly restarts. When the drive becomes damaged, Windows will start loading and then restart the computer to protect itself. Often we can repair the drive and either perform data recovery onto DVDs or CDs or copy the entire drive to a new one;
- Deleted files. If you’ve deleted files and emptied the recycle bin, we can usually recover the data if the hard drive is brought into us soon enough;
- Root directory, superblock, VTOC, Disk label structure, inode table, inode or file system corruption in Unix.
What kinds of computers can we perform data recovery on?
- Mac – HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper and FAT;
- Windows – NTFS and FAT;
- Unix – UFS, VxFS, HTFS, EAFS;
- Linux – EXT2, EXT3 and Reiser FS.
- BSD – UFS1 and UFS2
What kinds of hard drive errors can we perform data recovery on?
- The disk is damaged, do you want to initialize?
- -127 error disk could not be used/found
- File system dirty, run fsck
- The disk is unreadable
- Unmountable boot volume
- Unable to mount disk
- Missing or inaccessible volume
- Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
- NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart.
- Non-system disk or disk error. Replace and strike any key when ready
What kind of hard drives can we perform data recovery on?
- Desktop IDE drives
- Laptop IDE drives
- Desktop SATA drives
- Laptop SATA drives
- 68 pin SCSI drives
- 80 pin SCSI drives
- Pen drives
- Camera cards
The most important key to successful data recovery is that you bring your hard drive in as soon as you know that there’s a problem. This will substantially increase the likelihood that we will be able to recover your data for you. If the drive is internally damaged we can send the hard drive to our partners in Markham. They are considered the country’s best data recovery experts with the necessary clean rooms to disassemble and reassemble hard drives. Hard drives are hermetically sealed. A speck of dust will jam a hard drive. Please do not attempt this repair yourself or you may permanently damage the hard drive.
Contact us today for more information on our data recovery services and rates.
Examples of our work:
- One of our clients had a RAID 5 array with SATA drives. The server experienced a catastrophic controller failure, rendering the RAID array completely inoperable. This included blue screen, non-member disk errors, etc. We were able to reconstruct the RAID 5 array outside of his server and recover all the data off the drives, which we then copied to a backup hard drive.
- We worked on a SCO Openserver box, a very old Pentium 3 Acer server with hot swappable 80 pin SCSI hard drives. The motherboard had several damaged, blown capacitors and the final hard drive was severely corrupted. The drive was so corrupted we were unable to read any of the attributes of the drive, such as size or even what file system it had on it.First, we replaced all the damaged capacitors on the computer, powered the computer back up and added in a spare SCSI hard drive. We then embarked upon some major detective work, tracking down the company who originally deployed the server to find out what operating system they had used. Once we ascertained that it was a SCO Openserver box we successfully recovered all the data off of the failed hard drive.
- A client brought in a hard drive that could not be detected by Windows. They could not see it in Windows, nor would the computer detect it on start up. On inspection of the hard drive we discovered a blown chip on the controller. We sourced out another controller board, replaced it and successfully recovered the data onto a new drive.
- A client brought in a computer that failed to start Windows. All he wanted was his substantial collection of pictures that they’d taken over the years. Another computer repair depot told him that it was impossible and returned his computer after a month of having it in the shop. He brought it to us. Within an hour he had it back, booting back into Windows with the original install and all his programs and data.
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