"Free" recovery till death
Mark B., 2018-11-30 19:01
Today we got a drive from a client with all his personal photos and priceless memories of the last few years. Sadly the drive didnt't show the files anymore and start to make sometimes clicking noises. The client tryed first of all to recover the files itself with some free software. As the programm showed him all files he begin to recover the files but after a few hundred photos the programm stopped and display he must upgrade to the Pro-Version. After upgrading for a few USD he started the recovery over. But the process was running slower and slower so he let the programm do it's thing over night and went to bed.
Next moring was waiting a shock for him. The programm recovered a few more files and crashed before even reaching 20% of all files. Even the whole operating system was hanging. So the restarted the PC with the reset-button and after logging in again the PC hang again. From a friend he got the tip to unconnect the broken drive and the operating system was working normally again. At the point when he could not even connect the drive anymore to the PC he contacted us and send the drive over.
Usually in such cases we use spezialized hardware to read first all easy accessable data from the drive and fill in the data from a potentially bad or slow head afterwards. The used software-tool did it different and try to recover file after file and this used all heads. The operatring system also tryed to read failed sectors a few times before skipping to the next files and stressed the bad head with every file more and more till it finally compleatly failed.
With our tools we could retrive a few files more but to get all data back we had finally to do a head-swap. That made a 900 EUR recovery out of a 120 - 300 EUR recovery job!
