As we recently read, Mari’s beloved Asus netbook gave up the ghost. As they are wont to do. After a short period of some basic troubleshooting, she went the practical and conservative, perhaps costly, route of having a technician recover her data. It’s inevitable. Hardware will fail. And we’ve talked backup here several times over the years, so I’d rather now focus on a few (PC) disaster recovery tips.
Assuming you (or your mom, spouse, brother) don’t have a recent disk image or file backup from the impacted system for whatever reason, the top priority is to recover personal data from the drive. If it’s operable. OSes and software can be reinstalled. While videos of your kid are probably irreplaceable.
As Mari’s hard disk was still functional and she had an external optical drive handy, I had suggested booting into some other OS as a means of mounting the original drive and copying her data onto a USB stick. My first thought was for Mari to bring her laptop up with the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD), which contains a variety of useful tools for these situations. However, we were both a bit discouraged when we learned it had to be built off a local Windows XP disc. (I keep a copy of UBCD in the closet for emergencies, along with a few other tools, and I don’t recall how I built or acquired it.) So my next suggestion was to download an Ubuntu .iso – not to install, but to run as a Live CD. I wasn’t certain if it would automatically mount NTFS file systems, but figured it was worth a shot given the zero cost and minimal investment of time to try. But, at this point, Mari was ready to move on to other projects and we never went down this path. I also know there are a few custom recovery/technician sort of Linux builds out there. Possibly including the (skinned?) Geek Squad OS that Best Buy ultimately used to dump her data.
If Mari didn’t live about 2.5 hours away, I would have offered her a variety of drive enclosures and docks to take the Asus hardware entirely out of the equation in recovering her data. My latest addition, the Thermaltake BlacX SATA dock, was acquired about a year ago to recover a family member’s docs from a harddrive containing a corrupt Windows OS install. The dock connects to a good computer via USB and supports both desktop (3.5″) and laptop (2.5″) drives. For $30 or less, it can’t be beat. Optionally, there are a variety of cables that provide the same functionality. (Either would also come in handy for DIY TiVo drive replacement/expansion.)
Then there’s the case of the non-functioning hard drive. And this is where you’d probably want to call in the professionals. But if decide to roll the dice, I can offer two tips. The first is probably most applicable to a data center environment where a continually spinning drive (think months or years) can accumulate dust in the housing. If that computer comes down, the particles could become lodged, preventing normal disc spinning upon a reboot. It’s a potentially risky suggestion, but on a couple of occasions over the years, by firmly slamming the drive on the ground while keeping it perfectly level/horizontal, I’ve been to get it moving again. Long enough to get most data off. If your drive is already dead and you don’t have a resource available to recover data, it may not hurt to try. Another option, perhaps as much myth as reality, is to put the offending drive in the freezer for a time and see if it also buys you a few minutes to pull the meaningful bits off.
Another pair of utilities I keep handy are Darik’s Boot & Nuke and Heidi Eraser. Not specific or limited to disaster recovery, they’re useful for wiping drives or drive “white space” to be used prior to computer/drive disposal or eBaying. Mac OS X also includes solid drive wiping functionality if you don’t need to actually boot a system and Microsoft’s sdelete is pretty much equivalent to Eraser if you’re more comfortable with something somewhat official.
Know of other good recovery software or hardware we need in our toolkit?
Dave:
SpinRite, SpinRite, SpinRite! Dammit go buy it. You won’t regret it. It is the best utility for hard disk maintenance and file recovery. It often works miracles when other things won’t do anything. I have used since it first came out many, many years ago. Steve Gibson, its author has real money back guarantee. Don’t like it, he refunds your money, no questions asked.
Your Ubuntu path would have been a good one as well. Of late many of my “recovery” situations are virus ridden machines that just need “factory restore with format”. Most recent linux live CDs have full read/write support for NTFS. Boot the live CD, attach an external recovery drive and then copy or tar the users files onto the recovery drive. (A little Linux command line knowledge is needed unless you use some of the custom skinned recovery linux CDs).
I just used tar on my last one creating a 20G tarball on the recovery drive of the user’s Documents and Settings path. Hit factory restore with format, installed TeamViewer so I could finish the recovery work remotely, plugged in the recovery drive with the tarball and went home. Remotely did all the patching, rebooting, virus updating and file restore.
I’m extremely skeptical of SpinRite, and Steve Gibson in general. His tools are almost always knockoffs of other things, and sometimes poor knockoffs (e.g., his poor knockoff of SYNCookie years back, GENESIS). He seems to use buzz-words to promote his products, often crossing the line IMHO of being technically inaccurate. Take a look at his page for SecurAble for example.
I don’t know much about SpinRite in particular, but I do see a couple big negatives to it:
1) Cost: It seems completely unnecessary to spend $90 on something like this when there are so many other free tools out there. 90% of the time you don’t need anything other than an external enclosure or a generic live CD. When you need something more powerful, there are things like the UBCD4win or SystemRescueCD, both of which are free.
2) When a hard drive really does have a big problem, SpinRite might not be the best tool. If you’re having a hardware problem with your hard drive its important to very quickly get the data off before the drive completely fails. SpinRite isn’t designed to work quickly. It will try to read and re-read a hard drive sector over and over again until it recovers the sector. I think you’re much better off trying to quickly get off whatever data is undamaged, and then go back and work on the harder stuff.
As for my recommendations, I’d say people should first try to recover data by removing the hard drive, putting it in an external enclosure, and putting it into a different computer. I suspect that would work the vast majority of the time. But, it does require special hardware, which not everyone has on-hand.
If you don’t have an enclosure, and don’t want to buy one, I’d recommend either SystemRescueCD or UBCD4win. You can just download SystemRescueCD, which is nice, but you do have to “build” UBCD4win yourself. You need to do this because UBCD4win actually uses Microsoft Windows files, and the UBCD4win guys can’t redistribute those files. So, they give you a tool for getting those files off of WinXP CDs. It’s not hard, but it does involve lots of steps that you’re probably not going to want to do when you’re in a hurry to recover your data. As Dave does, it might be a good idea to create one of those CDs when everything is working just to have in around in case you run into problems.
SystemRescueCD and UBCD4win also contain a lot of tools for doing more sophisticated data recovery. I’d probably recommend UBCD4win slightly above SystemRescueCD, mainly because I think its a little easier to use.
UBCDforwin isnt too bad. most people can get away creating it with their OEM OS disk. driveimagexml is the best app on there to make an imaged. but, in an ER, you need another machine to make this disk…
regardless, if you drive is making the infamous “click” its scratching the platters… you need an app that can make an actual bit copy of the drive, its the only way to get the most data off the drive as possible…
Parted Magic! Parted Magic! Parted Magic!
It’s free bootable and has a swiss army knife of features (Truecrypt, Gparted, clonezilla, etc..)
http://partedmagic.com/
@Reggie14 Your opinion about SpinRite and Steve Gibson is an ill-informed one. It and he are both fantastic.
PC repair is part of my tech support business. SpinRite is unparalleled in repairing malfunctioning hard drives. The price of $90, for a one-time license, use on any drive you own, forever, is nothing compared to the prospect of never recovering lost data, irreplaceable photos and videos. It may not be fast but it works when everything else doesn’t.
Dave:
It would be great if you could do an article on backup solutions for PCs. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Like most people, I have most of my digital media on a single hard drive.
I’d kill for a Time Machine-like solution on Windows. Lately, I’ve been considering Rebit (www.rebit.com). Has anyone had any success with it? Can you suggest a similar solution?
Michael, any truly comprehensive backup plan probably consists if local duplication and off site storage. Windows Home Server (WHS) is powerful and can handle multiple PCs on the network – somewhat similar to an Apple Time Machine/Capsule solution. For single machines a simpler solution, I took a look at the Seagate Replica which runs just about $100. For a more DIY approach, I’ve always been pleased with imaging onto external storage from Acronis software.
Important files, pics, docs can be shipped off to the cloud via something like Mozy for peace of mind and runs a few dollars a month. Although, disk images and other stuff could also be offloaded to Amazon S3 with something like Jungle Disk. (Assuming you don’t have a restrictive broadband cap…)
ONE WORD: SPINRITE!!!!!
OK, a few more words:
– those that attack Steve Gibson usually have some agenda. I don’t understand why there is such vitriol against him. He’s a terrific guy who has developed terrific tools
– if SpinRite doesn’t work, you get your money back. Instantly. Steve honors his warranty.
It’s the best solution out there and its free if it doesn’t work. What’s the harm in trying it.
…Dale