This month we are supposed to talk about viruses. My first ever article for Computorlink was on a virus experience that I encountered some time ago. (See www.icehouse.net/demattia for the full article.) The proper way to deal with viruses, or any number of other horrible computing experiences, is to keep proper backups. Unless you are on a corporate LAN, where somebody Else is paid to do this for you, it never happens. It certainly rarely happens on a home computer, no matter what the motivation, no matter what the resources. My home system has both a Zip removable disk drive and a Qic 80 tape drive, and it only rarely gets completely backed up. (However, my really important stuff, like Computerlink articles, are backed up to floppy immediately, and then copied to several other machines.)
So, what happens when, worse than a virus, your disk hardware goes south. Or sometimes, you just screwed up a command, and blew away an important file, like maybe the operating system kernel. Or maybe you found a virus that got through your anti viral detection packages. And, of course, you have no backup, and you have some really important stuff on your now mangled disk, which if you do not get back, will end your world, your job, your relationships, or your reason for existence. What then?
If you toasted your disk because of a bad command, often there are some simple, and cheap ways to get things back. If you erased a file, you can always grab a copy of something like Norton's Uneraser and get it back, unless you have walked on the sectors a couple of times with other programs. I have had occasion to use Norton's Utilities, and they work pretty well. If you did something to totally cream your OS, but at least have your FAT tables intact, you can always plug your disk into somebody else's machine as their second disk, and they can probably read your disk contents, or at least whatever is left of them. If you even blew away the FAT tables, then good ole Mr Norton has a few solutions for you there too.
But what if your problem was, you were pecking away at the keyboard, and all of a sudden you hear a sound that is far worse than, say, several sets of fingernails on a surround sound Dolby Prologic blackboard. Followed by a blue screen of death, or even a black screen of emptiness. We are talking full scale disk crash, the kind that rips the oxide off the substrate, the kind that bends disk arms into little balls, the kind that gives full meaning to owning a 1Gb Frisbee.
Disk crashes do not happen much any more, because the technology has improved so much in the last twenty years. When I started working with computers in the mid 60's, you were lucky to have any kind of disk on your system at all. My first professional assignment was on a paper tape loadable computer.
High end minicomputers in those days generally had either a 1311 disk drive, which was the five platter open to the air disk packs that looked something like a pizza cutter on steroids, or the 1315 disk cartridge. Both of these disk formats existed for more than 10 years - at our WWW plant here in Spokane, we just got rid of our last disk cartridge unit last year. They were totally open to the air, to fingerprints, to cigarette smoke, to dust particles, to anything that floated by. Keep in mind that even then, the disk heads flew only a few millionths of an inch above the surface of the disk. Diagrams of the time showed comparisons of how large hair, and dust particles were, compared to the gap between the head and the surface. Any anything like that, which happened to be in the drive when it started up, could and would generate a crash. An even more vivid experience would be when the disk head, for whatever the reason, simply refused to fly, and cut a perfectly circular groove into your disk platter.
This was rather obvious on the disk packs. It was not obvious on the disk cartridges, because the cartridge was designed to prevent stuff, like even your eyeballs, from getting to the disk surface. I was present at one time when a computer had a disk crash. The operator, not realizing what happened, removed the disk, took it to another computer, and immediately ruined its head. We had about five more computers in the room, and he managed to nail four of them before he figured out it was the disk itself causing the problem, and not the disk drives which were faulty.
IBM finally introduced their original Winchester disk drive in 1973, mostly as a competitive move against third party disk media and disk drive makers, of which there were quite a number. They all went bankrupt, but the good news was, the Winchester disk drive was a much better system, and virtually every hard drive disk you encounter today traces its technological roots to that Winchester technology.
Today's disk drives are rated in the hundreds of thousands of hours Mean Time Between Failure. But that simply means, in a population of several dozen thousand disk drives in the Spokane area alone, some drive will fail for some reason in just this area every week or so. The failure could be as dramatic as a head crash, or more likely it could be a burnt out circuit on the electronic package built onto the disk drive itself. In either case, you will not have access to your data.
This did in fact happen to a friend of mine a couple of years ago. He writes articles for magazines, he had written most of an article for a client, and the disk went south. Massive screeching of metal against ceramic. No backups. Deadline looming. No way he wanted to recreate this rather large and technical article from memory.
It turns out that there are a bunch of companies out there that can help you with these problems. They bill themselves as Data Recovery companies. They are Not Cheap. Figure about $500 to just get them looking at your problem, and maybe double that to actually attempt to recover your data. They claim 95% success rate, the 5% probably being the case where the oxide was ripped from the platter.
They have the techniques to do the simple things, like use sophisticated software programs to get at data that has been mangled, or virused, but not physically destroyed. If your circuitry fried, they can fix it. If your head crashed but the platter is still OK, they have more heads, and have clean rooms where they can open the drive, replace the head, and close it up again and still keep the drive under manufacturer warrantee. If you did go the ultimate, and really wrecked the platter, drowned it, pulled it out of a computer after your building burned down, retrieved your laptop after somebody tossed it off a bridge, they can remove the platter from the case, and use special equipment to find whatever magnetic impulses are still left on whatever media has survived your disaster.
My friend got his entire article back, and most of the rest of the disk too, including some stuff he did not remember was even there, for about $800 in his case. Response is quite quick. Some of these places staff their sites 24 X 7, and when they do recover the data, will modem it back to you.
A couple of the Data Recovery sites that have better than average web sites are www.ontrack.com, and www.datamechanix.com, and www.eco-datarecov.com.
The next article that I was going to write was going to be on backup systems. The short course is, forget about Novaback, and go for Backup Exec.