by John Gaudio
I always tell my clients to backup their data, and I back mine up too, but sometimes something important either gets missed in the backup, or gets stored after your most recent backup. Murphy's law, being what it is, that's when your hard drive is most likely to fail. Last week I spent five wonderful days at my sister's house in Houston. Unfortunately, just before I left my house for the airport, my portable computer refused to boot. I packed it away to fix it on the plane, but alas, it wasn't that simple.
I found a fellow in Houston, Shawn Zernik, owner of Internetwork Consulting, who pulled the drive from my laptop, and hooked it up to one of his systems while I was having dinner. I thought there was probably just a corrupted file on some part of the boot sector, and that it would be easy to pull off my data, buy a new hard drive, install the operating system and software, and then restore my data. Sadly, I was a thousand miles from my backup, and the drive didn't want to give up much of my data. Fortunately I was familiar with a Denver based company called digitalmedix, and spoke the following day with Craig, their COO and President. He said I could FedEx the drive to him then, or bring it in when I returned on Monday. I chose to keep it in my hot little hands and deliver it personally.
Monday morning I met with Craig, Jeff, and Brady, in their offices in the basement of a Wells Fargo Bank building. An appropriate place, I think, for the safe keeping and recovery of my important data. Jeff gave me a brief tour, and I was particularly impressed when they had me wait a minute while all monitors were turned off in the recovery area. These people take the privacy of their clients very seriously, and that's a very good thing.
Computers with hard drive cables sticking out, some connected to drives, some waiting for them, were neatly stacked on racks covering two of the four walls. There was also a class 100 clean room, which I couldn't enter, where they open up drives, when necessary, to correct mechanical problems. In the hallway were racks with thousands of disk drives. These are some of the tools of the trade, used for parts, when necessary, to coax the data from disk drives like mine.
Digitalmedix isn't limited to PCs, or even hard drives. Craig also showed me the "special" rack. He told me they've pulled contact information from dead cell phones, and even showed me the charred remains of an answering machine that had some very special messages on it. Digitalmedix also coaxes pictures from camera memory cards, and finds information that's been "erased" from perfectly good working computers. Their experts testify in court as expert witnesses, and preserve the integrity of the evidence they find on the forensic side of the business. These guys are serious problem solvers.
I spoke with Craig Sapp, COO and President, about the process and prognosis for recovering my files, and with both Jeff Patrick, VP of sales, and Brady Essman, CEO, about digitalmedix, Blogsites, this article, and the sad story of my hard drive, a story which I sincerely hope will have a happy ending. I'm also hoping that digitalmedix will turn out to be one of my favorite places for data recovery, when all is said and done. Of course, this will depend to some extent on how successful they are at getting my data back. (No pressure guys.) ;-)
One of the things I like about digitalmedix, is the fact that if they can't recover your data, there's no charge for the basic evaluation. Digitalmedix offers a 100% service guarantee. The only charge if they can't recover your data would be the cost of parts they needed to try and get your data back. Other companies I spoke with wanted two or three hundred dollars just to look at the drive. If digitalmedix can retrieve your data, the charges for typical recoveries are between $500.00 and $2000.00 dollars, plus the cost of parts and return media. The final amount varies based on what it takes to recover your precious data.
Craig's preliminary report on my drive indicates that there's a problem on the media itself, that layer of electromagnetic material on the platter of my disk drive where all the ones and zeros are supposed to be "safely" tucked away. Most likely the drive head "crashed" into the platter for some reason and did some damage. Craig is now working his magic, and hopefully I'll know more soon. When I know, I'll let you know. In the mean time I'll be saying a few prayers for these guys and the successful recovery of my data. It never hurts to bring in a little extra help. :-)
Digitalmedix can be reached at 866-DIG-MEDX, (866-344-6339.)
Internetwork Consulting can be reached at 832-606-3300. |
