When hard drives go bad…

Recently, a couple of friends of mine at work suddenly lost hard drives to disaster.  I helped coach them through the recovery process in a public thread on our work’s “Fun” mailing list, and I received a lot of positive feedback from others who were interested in the same subject, so I thought I would use my blog to impart the same advice, derived from personal experience.  You see, I went through a catastrophic hard drive crash last year, just 4 days before starting my new job.  Oh fun.  The “drive” was actually two drives in a RAID 0 configuration, which meant it used both drives by striping data with no redundancy and no fault tolerance.  That was a stupid choice on my part, and one I’ll never make again, because all it took was one damaged platter (out of 10) to destroy the entire drive.  It ended up being unrecoverable and I lost 800+ GB of data from the last 17 years – documents, pictures, video, you name it.  I didn’t have any formal backup, and let me tell you – I openly wept.  I’ve never felt so heartbroken before, and I’m not sure how I got through the next several weeks intact.  So if anyone else out there has had that same sinking feeling in your gut as your hard drive puttered out right in front of you, I know what you’re going through.  Luckily, over the next couple of months, I was able to restore nearly all the data from older drives (good for me for taking them out of my computer and stashing them away as they were replaced by larger drives over the years), and in the end I “only” lost most of my pictures and video from 2006 (I say “only” as a relative term; the loss was nevertheless not insignificant).  It worked out to about a 90% recovery.  Considering I could have lost all my data since 1993 had I not had those old drives, I count myself as exceptionally lucky.  Still, I did lose my 2006 data, it stopped my sideline photography business in its tracks, and it took countless hours to piece together my data from numerous other sources.  The lesson:  always keep a formal backup.

Before I managed to scrounge my own data off old drives, I went through the recovery process with two different companies, and I learned a lot about hard drives in the process.  Here are a few tips:

• Is your drive making any kind of clicking or grinding noise?  If so, you have a head/platter problem of some sort.  This is bad.  Power down the drive and don’t power it back up again.  There is nothing you can do to help, and in fact you can damage the drive worse, much worse.  You have to send it to a recovery service – there is no way to fix it yourself.
• If you drive isn’t making any noise, and in fact sounds like it’s not spinning or powering up, you’re in luck.  This is probably a mechanical problem that will be easier to fix than a damaged head or platter, and easier to recover from.  Even so, you’ll still want to use a professional recovery service – I wouldn’t risk damaging the drive further.
• If you really feel like you know what you’re doing, and suspect the controller card, you probably can’t hurt anything by changing it.  Still, be careful, and don’t hesitate to use recovery services if you feel like you’ve gone in over your head.
• Don’t open the drive for any reason.  The platters need to exist in a dust-free, totally clean environment.  Why do head crashes occur?  Because while the platters are spinning at unimaginable speeds, that head is floating just microns over the surface, and all it takes is a collision with a single microscopic dust particle to bounce the head and make it come in contact with the platter.  Once that happens, it’s game over.  If you open the drive and somehow get it working again, it won’t work for long, if at all.  I don’t see the percentage here – just send it to a pro.
• Recovery services can be pricey, but they don’t all charge $10,000 to get your data.  I used Seagate and Ontrack.  Both were very reasonable, charged me only a nominal evaluation fee, and didn’t charge me anything when they couldn’t recover my data.  If they had recovered my data, I would have paid $2500 to Seagate or $2000 to Ontrack (plus the cost of the new drive in both cases), very reasonable prices for 800GB of data.  The price depends on the size of the drive and the difficulty of recovery.  Some places did quote me prices upwards of $8000-10,000 (one place quoted me the patently ridiculous price of $16,5000) – as you can guess, I simply ignored them and moved on.
• As far as I can tell, anecdotes aside, the freezer thing is an urban legend.  Maybe it “works”, maybe it doesn’t, but I wouldn’t try it until I’d exhausted every single other possibility, including recovery services.  I went ahead and tried this on my drive after it went through attempted recovery, with no results.  Why would it work?  The platters were damaged – freezing wasn’t going to change that.  I could see where freezing might help a purely mechanical problem, but again, you risk damaging the drive worse, and most mechanical problems can be easily and reliably solved by a professional.  I wouldn’t bother with such an unproven, hit-and-miss theory unless there was nothing left to lose, and even then I wouldn’t hope for much.

Ok, so that’s probably enough of my educated amateur analysis.  My recovery service recommendations:  Seagate (services.seagate.com) or Ontrack (www.ontrack.com).  I would actually recommend Ontrack first.  Seagate was unable to give me anything at all, except that the drive was dead and unrecoverable.  They had no real details on the extent or nature of the damage, and they couldn’t read anything off of it.  Ontrack was actually able to get my damaged drive readable again, and were able to recover the directory structure and filenames of everything on it.  Unfortunately, they also determined that 3 of the 10 platters were scratched, and since the data was striped across all 10 platters, this made only some of the smallest files recoverable.  Still, I would say they got better results than Seagate did.  Both companies are very reasonably priced and won’t quote you $10K or something insane like that.  You pay a small evaluation fee ($50 or so) for them to determine if the drive can be recovered.  If it can, you agree to pay for the recovery, and they’ll image your drive onto new media.  IF YOUR DATA IS IMPORTANT TO YOU, ESPECIALLY IF IT’S IRREPLACEABLE DATA LIKE PICTURES OR VIDEO, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND TAKING THIS ROUTE WITHOUT RESERVATION AND WITHOUT TRYING TO FIX IT YOURSELF. I mean, why mess around?  If all you want to do is recover your old gaming files and stuff, fine, hack away.  But if you’re trying to get back irreplaceable data, and you’re not yourself a hard drive technician, don’t take chances.  Send it to a service.  If Ontrack could have recovered my data, it would have been worth every penny of the $2000 fee to me, if only for the 2006 pictures and video alone.  I would still pay that if someone could recover it today.

One more thing, and this goes for everyone who has had a hard drive crash or not:  make backing up your new religion.  I used to do it casually, leaving data here and there and always telling myself I would “get to it someday” when it came to making true formal backups.  Unfortunately, the crash came before “someday” did, and I paid a heavy price, almost the heaviest price (total data loss).  Never again.  I now buy two drives at a time and always keep a mirror (Mac OS X makes this a breeze with Time Machine, but any good backup program will do).  I burn pictures to DVD and hand those out to family.  And I have an external drive that I write all my data to once a month, and store that at a friend’s house.  If a drive fails now, I can easily replace it with a backup drive and buy a new mirror drive, losing no data and paying no recovery fees.  The feeling of genuine security alone is worth it.  Backup backup backup!  Don’t wait until the worst happens.  Everyone does anyway, and they don’t realize until it happens to them, but I am telling you now – you never want to feel that sinking feeling in your gut as your drive poops out on you right in front of your helpless eyes.  I’ve never had a worse day in my life, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to anyone else I know.  Backup daily!

I hope this helps someone, somewhere.  Do a Google search for “hard drive recovery” or similar for more information than you ever wanted to know about this topic.  And if you have some advice of your own, feel free to leave a comment.