Microwaved hard disc, run-over PC and other data disasters

FFS!

"I put it into the microwave." A student had the bright idea of putting his machine into a microwave "just wanted to find out what happened". This resulted in a smelly microwave and a costly data recovery job.

And these people complain they cannot get suitable employment after their study terms have finished?!?!

Isn't 5 a double-fail?

"During a demo to show how to clean off data from a machine that was to be donated to charity, a user accidentally deleted data from her hard drive"

Not only did the user clean of the wrong data, she didn't do it securely.

I wonder how drives are sent in with the note, "I'm trying to recover someone-else's confidential data they thought was erased"

Gotta Love It

Sooner or later, you either have to be a good mechanic or know one. Pity the poor bustard who thinks a backup is a dance move.

As a Dinosaur ...

.... from the DOS age, I have batch files that make DOS copies to multiple destinations: internal hard drives, external hard drives, LAN computers, smart phones, flash drives and etc. They run several times a day in background based on certain events. Slow as hell, but who cares, and any comparable computer can open any of the files immediately...no "restore" involved.

Yeah, my former employer with 25,000+ personal computers worldwide had bazillions of gigabytes of data and therefore had to have a true backup program. Still, me as the employee kept multiple native format copies (.xls, .doc, .bat, .txt and etc) of my work for my own piece of mind. And it paid off more than once. Imperfect for sure, but what isn't?

Pendrives don't work either.

I lost data due to one of these ()!£!$!!$ing things.

Seems that some desktops and laptops made a few years back by a "Famous Brand" work perfectly if you use them with old usb hardware, but can sometimes damage newer pendrives without properly designed input protection to the point that the entire drive becomes unreadable.

Lost >3GB of data, most of which wasn't backed up.

Then the same thing happened AGAIN! a year later with a "tough" pendrive and an ageing PIII-600 system. 1GB gone forever, no way to get it back as both flash chips were fried beyone repair.

interestingly enough most of my hdd failures have been faulty USB controllers, only had one genuinely fried drive which had mechanical damage due to acute concrete poisoning.

AC, because i really hate a certain "Famous Brand" with a religious fervour.

Data Recovery ha-ha

I take all this data recovery with a very large grain of salt. For instance I had emails, correspondence and photographs, eBay receipts plus tons of really useful downloaded information on my best laptop, an Advent 7016 (Pentium 4 2.7GHz). Much of this information was backed-up on my spare laptop (3 spindle Toshiba with a Pentium 4 2.2GHz processor) The important photographs of an accident damaged car of mine were left in the Panasonic camera (litigation still dragging on) and other data was backed-up on USB drives. Pretty well backed up you might think - actually NO. The pikeys burgled the house and an adjacent builders yard whilst I was at the supermarket and they took all the decent stuff. EVERYTHING GONE! Old Pentium 1 and Pentium 2 laptops which I'd planned to refurbish for a hard-up friend were ignored as was a Kodak 2 megapixel camera. The 10 megapixel 12 x zoom Leica lens Panasonic Lumix vanished needless to say along with all the decent cameras in my collection. There must have been an army of burglars considering how much stuff was taken in the time I was away. (six copper hot water cylinders, copper pipe, heavy armoured cable and a pallet load of slates all went as well as numerous other items some of which were virtually irreplaceable) My Christmas wish would be for them to be all caught and put in the electric chair but we don't do that over here. I am a senior citizen so its not like I can go and work overtime to get the money to replace the stolen items. A friend who works in Cardiff has also been burgled. The front door was forced whilst he was at work and his three month old HP laptop was stolen complete with all its accessories. In England laptop theft is a major growth industry!

Permanent secure erasure.

Some pretty exotic ways of destroying the drives in that lot.

The best and, to my mind the easiest, is to hold the drive in a bag or towel then strike it sharply with a blunt object like a hammer or heavy tool. One or two 'taps' usually shatters the platters making the drive useful a a maracas...

Burglars

Simple solution, back everything up onto Carbonite, or for the cheapskate, Humyo.

Problem solved.

Oh, and did I mention that copper thefts are becoming a growth industry, even to the point that scrap yards are being broken into to steal the scrap copper?

There is enough useful metal in a reel of electrical cable to make it worth stealing, as many unfortunate electricians with white vans will confirm.

Hang the thieving scumbags high I say, or send them to the electric chair, yay for poetic justice.

AC, because I don't want said scumbags to know where I live...

my recovery story of the year

had a poor grad student come to me and say her computer had been hit by a car when moving back to school. i figured... ok, she was packing and left it on the ground and never put it on the car and ran it over, pretty tragic. turned out.... she had it packed and strapped down with all her stuff on the car, it slipped off on highway around 75 mph and got it full-speed by a SUV. bag contained both her machine and ext hard drive. her ext hard drive enclosure took the brunt of the blow.... her laptop was smashed up beyond repair... however the internal drive worked and i was able to help her recover!!! her external actually took the blow well, it disintegrated it's own ext enclosure and even shattered her connectors to the sata pins, but the drive itself maintained it's integrity... it plugged in, no broken plastic or anything into a new external enclosure! i thought "this thing may work!". it was then i rested it on a flat surface and realized that it (the bare-bones drive) was no longer a flat surface... the impact had essentially warped the drive just barely. and... ya... it powered up but could not spin. overall i was still impressed! but dont let your computer take a 75MPH blow or you could be sending your drive to these guys.

just had to share.

data recovery... I made a youtube video!

search for 'mhuizing' on youtube for a fun little video called 'replacing hard drive read/write heads'

I made this a while ago and features me and a home-made dust-free box. Some of the comments are hilarious.

For the record: I know I am not doing it the right way but I did the best I could with the tools I had at my disposal. Physical damage to the platters... and I managed to retrieve some of the data.

On my right hand I have a ring that was seated between two platters and belonged to a 3.5 inch notebook hard drive that was given to me for data retrieval.

Microwaved Hard Drive

It's what we call 'cold', three minutes on high should do the trick?

(from the much missed Salmon Days series)