My Hard Drive Died #8 – Hard Drive Underwater?

My Hard Drive Died - Podnutz

Hosted by Steve Cherubino and Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com.

Topics discussed:

Upcoming Conferences

Feb/6 Washington, DC
ShmooCon 2010 Security conference & Data Recovery

Link to PDF presentation 20MB

Feb/9–13 Atlanta, GA
Hardware and Software data recovery, how to start your own company, etc

Average Forensic / Data Recovery Job
Civil Cases / Private Investigators $2,500 to $3,000 12-15 hours
Criminal Cases $5,000 to $10,000 Hard Work

Hard Drive Cleaners
Electronic stores normally have cleaners available that can be used to clean boards

There are different levels of cleaners (corrosion, circuit boards, heads, etc)

Pure alcohol will work in most situations
3M sells a head cleaner at a cost of around $1,000 per ounce

Email Question:

Chris
Q: How to recover data from a drive that spent time under water
A: Platters may be in good shape, electronics also may be in good condition, do not dry the drive; corrosion may damage the drive

Chris
Q: How to recover data from an SD card that no longer shows the correct CHS (Cylinders Heads and Sectors)
A: Solid State is still a struggle for data recovery, only few people in the US are capable of doing this, imaging is an available option,

Solid State Drives – YouTube Video

Chris
Q: How to recover data from an NTFS partition that was formatted as EXT3 (Linux Journaling File System)
A: Only few records and tables are lost, unless it’s the new windows long format (it will wipe the drive clean)

Light Peak Technology
Intel’s new technology which delivers high bandwidth starting at 10Gbps.

Miscellaneous protection and recovery tools:
Faronics DeepFreeze
Shadow Copy
ShadowExplorer
Windows SteadyState
RecoverMyFiles

Notes by Jorge Hernandez of 123ComputerRepair.com