Have you destroyed your hard drive lately? (Part 2)
If you have not read part 1, please go here: http://blog.harryfino.com/?p=116.
After panicking [I had no idea panicking had a K in it...], I knew I had to do something to make sure I didn’t lose my data. I stopped all windows updates, etc, and downloaded a tool to help investigate the situation: TestDisk.
I ran it and tried to recover the partition myself. I wasn’t able to find the partition by doing a deep search for NTFS logical partitions. It wasn’t until I did a deep search for “Non-partitioned Media” that I found my files. The only problem with this is that I wasn’t able to rebuild the partition table with this option. At this point I was at least happy that the NTFS filesystem was still intact… even if I couldn’t get to it.
I decided to call a specialist.
Living in the Philadelphia area, I quickly found a company called American Data Recovery (ADR). After speaking with another company that outsourced their customer service to another country, ADR’s customer service was music to my ears. I spoke to a gentlemen named Dustin, who wasn’t just a service rep or sales guy, but a techie like myself. I explained my situation to him and he told me that since my drive wasn’t damaged that their service would cost anywhere between $300 to $1200. Ouch! I’m really hating Battlefield Heroes right now!
Dustin wasn’t shocked that I was having a heart attack on the phone and told me that it sounds like I was smart enough to do it myself. He told me to use RStudio to create an image of the drive on a second piece of media and then to RStudio’s recovery tools to retrieve the files. I told him I would consider it, and then call back if I wanted to use their service. If his original estimate was lower, I would have just sent my drive in — incredible first impression.
I went to RStudio’s website and checked out their tools. Only $50 for their NTFS tool… I could handle that! I dusted off my old computer and turned it on. That was when I realized that I had absolutely nothing (big enough) to put my drive image on. So I had to make a decision. Do I go out and buy all the tools I needed to do this job, or do I just send it to some people who know what they’re doing. I decided to send it in. Luckily, they were local in Philadelphia, so I didn’t have to ship my drive, just walk it in.
