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Joined: May 2000
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Quote:
G'day Mac,
your comments are appreciated, but with all due respect, we haven't been fooled into suspecting a faulty HDD by a software cause in many, many years...
Just tell me how you proof that first.
See, If I write malicious code that even just overly taxes the drive to the point that hardware fails, it would be easy to assume that to be a hardware failure, but not good forensics.
--Mac
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Quote:
See, If I write malicious code that even just overly taxes the drive to the point that hardware fails, it would be easy to assume that to be a hardware failure, but not good forensics.
 Don't need to write anything - Windows already does that by itself...
More seriously though, it would be a hardware failure - software cause I admit, but still a hardware failure, and our customers would likely see degradation in performance* and ask us to fix it before the drive actually failed - however, the only arguments that I can reasonably give to counter that particular scenario are:
a) We don't get "repeat failures". Either your putative code never made it to the new drive OR it never existed... We very often are able to recover data from failing drives and clone 'em before they actually fail completely. If the customer gets here soon enough we usually save everything - the new drives will be clones of the failed ones 'cos that saves enormous amounts of time, and therefore money, and gets our customers systems into a known state. We always perform malware scans to make as sure as we possibly can that no systems go back out the door with malware still installed.
b) Please give me an example of such code "in the wild", I'm not aware of any but then I don't know everything either. That said, these days the vast majority (perhaps all) of malicious code is looking to extract data, not break things.
c) Why would such code be HDD brand specific? We see less Seagate's and WD's fail than anything else. Amongst the big names, our current contender for highest failure rates is Fujitsu, followed by Toshiba. That's not to say they're bad, they just happen to fail a little more often.
Anything is possible, but not everything is probable.
*actually, thinking about it - most of them wouldn't - we see some dreadfully poor performing systems that some fairly simple clean-ups make enormous differences to.
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This open forum is decidedly NOT the place to discuss or reveal such info.
--Mac
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Mac, you’re probably right in that the drive is a Seagate. I just reported what was on the label and the fact I bought by warranty and not name brand. I’ve used this philosophy for years now and I’ve had excellent using warranty times as my main criteria when purchasing hard drives.
Lawrie, I know the CDs don’t last as long as advertised but thanx for bringing that up. I doubt very much there will be a CD player 200 years from now anyway! I have lost data in as little as two months using cheap CDs for archival purposes. So now I only used the archival gold CDs, burning at a very slow rate then verify said burn.
Back in my day the only time we started panic buying was when the bartender shouted "last call"!
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
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Joined: Jan 2002
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Lawrie,
What software would you recommend to attempt to recover data from a deleted partition, or an overwritten partition? There are many software companies that claim it can be done, but I'm not having a lot of success with the software I bought, Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery.
Any suggestion would be appreciated.
All hard drives are healthy and running well, I just overwrote, or deleted the partition in my stupidity.
Gary
I'm blessed watching God do what He does best. I've had a few rough years, and I'm still not back to where I want to be, but I'm on the way and things are looking far better now than what they were!
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G'day Gary,
to recover trashed partition tables or deleted partitions, we find that the Norton tools work fairly well. On occasion we have had to resort to another tool called Active@ which we downloaded from the net for a modest fee. It's been very good.
We aren't in the game of trying to recover from overwritten partitions/disks. That's out of our league entirely, we don't own an electron microscope...
In general, deleted or damaged partition tables usually recover OK. A partition that's actually been overwritten is, for all practical purposes, gone.
Our primary requirement is to recover data from failing drives. For the most part we find Norton Ghost - with the correct parameters selected in order to do a sector copy - does this tolerably well. It's not uncommon to take a week on a really bad drive and still get everything although we also get drives that simply won't recover. (Dead is dead unless the platter is OK and you have clean room facilities etc..) Of course, we have systems sitting on the bench setup just for this task. Ghost is NOT installed on the PC, we boot from the Ghost CD and run the character based version - better options. Note that the very latest version no longer has this capability so when we start running into file systems that our current version doesn't understand we'll need to go looking for something else - probably something on a live CD I'd guess.
In the end, it depends what our customers are willing to pay for - time is money and some of these recovery processes take time (I.e. technician labour actually doin' stuff, not the above mentioned PC chugging away for a week or so). Those that can afford the really labour intensive recoveries don't need 'em - they do proper backups...
--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya  --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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Joined: Nov 2000
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I'm sure some people have had good luck with LaCie -- but I've just had two LaCie 500 GB drives fail, both of which are a couple of years old. Being the curious type, I opened the external metal enclosures. I was surprised to find that each of the 500GB drives actually consisted of two 250 GB drives (no wonder the external cases were so big and heavy). I was even more surprised to find that inside one of the enclosures were two drives from Western Digital; the other enclosure had two IBM drives. We're talking about the same LaCie model here, identical except for drives from different manufacturers. I also discovered through further testing that all of these drives actually still worked -- it was the LaCie enclosure that went bad.
I've also had bad luck with Seagate (had an external drive that would make a weird tapping noise, then freeze; sent it in to Seagate under warranty after owning it just over 30 days, and got back a replacement drive with exactly the same problem -- and a $25 service charge. Seagate had promised not to bill my credit card, but did anyway, and it took another month to straighten that out.) I'm sure someone has a horror story about every manufacturer, but I can see no reason to buy a drive from LaCie, since they don't really make drives -- might as well just ask for whatever's behind "door number two." And Seagate won't get a third chance to give me a drive that doesn't work. I do own at least half a dozen internal and external drives from Western Digital, and none have given me problems -- yet.
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