[SLL] Hard drive recovery

[Derek Simkowiak]

    I've experienced Vogon and OnTrack services, but neither are local.

    The Vogon incident was a hardware RAID5 array where 2 of 7 disks 
failed (thus losing the redundancy of RAID5).  The OnTrack incident was 
for a multi-disk partition within a fiber SAN.  Both of those are 
considerably more complex than a simple disk drive failure, so I'd 
recommend either one.  Going from rough memory think Vogon was ~$8K 
(around 1999) and OnTrack was ~$12K (around 2006).

    Funny story: Around 1999 (or so), somebody asked me to look at their 
"dead" Win98 C: drive.  So I plugged it into my Win98 workstation as the 
D: drive.  The disk was correctly recognized, but all the files had 
random garbled names, and the data was garbage.  It looked like the 
entire drive was corrupted.

    Then I rebooted my workstation into Linux, mounted /dev/hdb, and 
there were all the files, including AUTOEXEC.BAT, etc. plain as day.  
For some reason, the Linux implementation was able to read the 
filesystem.  I got a good laugh out of that one.

    That was almost as funny as when they discovered an "encrypted" 
WindowsNT filesystem could read plaintext by simply mounting it under 
Linux.  That was a few years ago... I think MS fixed that one (?), but 
earlier this year I discovered the password protection on MS Access 
database files (.mdb) could be bypassed altogether by using the Linux 
MDBTools package. 

--Derek

Francois Caen wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> Anyone here has any first hand experience with a (preferably local)
> hard drive recovery company? There are tons of them in Google, but I
> can't find a local one and I can't tell if they're good or not.
>
> Thanks,
>
>