It doesn't matter what it costs, please get my data back!

I thought I'd share one of my proudest moments as a bench tech. I suspect most of us who are interested in this type of work frequently encounter customers with lost data. Usually the issue is resolved with a simple undelete application, of which there are many. Sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves and image the disk and attempt to recover readable files. No matter the method, it's the best feeling in the world to be able to call the customer and tell then you did recover their wedding pictures or important school work. The look on their faces when they come in to pick up the freshly burned DVD with their critical data makes you forget all the mouthbreathers with their insect ridden e-machines (almost).

But then there's that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you plug in the customer's PC and hear the "click BANG" or "BOING whirllllll" of a failed HDD while the BIOS reports no bootable drive. You have to look them in the eye and tell them you are already 99% sure the drive is dead and there is nothing you can do about it. You hand them the little card with the number to DriveSavers or similar professional data recovery and warn them it's going to cost a lot of money. You are kind enough not to scold them about their lack of a backup, that would only cause pain now. They already know.

Flash back to 2007. One morning I get to the shop to find a customer standing outside the front door with one of those ubiquitous claim-shell Dell PCs under an arm. The look in his eyes alone tells me all I really need to know about the situation. I tell him to come in and put the PC on the counter. We exchange niceties as I plug in the monitor and keyboard and turn it on.

We encounter the message he told me to expect, the PC can't find a bootable drive. I open it up to make sure everything is plugged in and notice the drive is not spinning. Not good, but there could be an innocent answer. I pull the drive and try it out with a known good power supply. Unfortunately with the same result.

I tell him "(Customer), it seems you have a failed hard drive. Since it won't spin up I can't really help you." His exact words: "It doesn't matter what it costs, please get my data back!" It turns out this guy is an office manager at a local veterinary practice. It must be a fairly big organization as they employ about 10 vets and about 40 other folks including cleaning staff, etc. This PC under his arm contains the entirety of their accounting everything. Payroll, tax stuff, accounts receivable, everything. He explains that they will go out of business if they can't get the data on that drive.

I let him know that data recovery from a failed drive takes specialized skills and resources, neither of which we have in this mom 'n pop computer repair outfit. I give him the DriveSavers card and tell him to be prepared for a bill in the $1000's if they are successful at all. Considering the importance of his data I thought it was a no-brainer to go this route. $2000 is nothing to a medical office likely billing out over a million dollars each year.

Well, I would not be writing this if the dude had any sense.

He's like: "$2000 for data recovery? And it might take weeks? I don't know... Can't you do it?" I tell him the truth: If I try to recover his data and fail there is a huge chance I'll make it worse and less likely for a professional data recovery specialist to get it. He really needs to go to the specialist. Yet despite this, he continues to talk me into it telling me they can't possibly go weeks without this PC. They need their data by tomorrow for tax reasons.

So I told him to give me his number and I'd do some research and get back to him. I call in my fellow nerds and we research (our Google-Fu was strong that day). We end up with a list of about 8 or so things to try to order them by risk. We even manage to find two of the same model drives from the junkyard downstairs to look at. By early afternoon I think we've learned what we can and I call the customer.

I tell him I'll try it, but it's foolish. He describes an office in pure chaos and says they are willing to take the risk. I tell him I'm going to charge $75 / hour for my time successful or not, to which he agrees. I also tell him to bring in any other Dells they purchased as the same time as the broken one as I want more drives from the same batch if possible. My boss prints out a unique addendum to our usual waver all customers sign, something to protect us from the consequences of potentially (likely) destroying this data and the other PC drives as well.

Guy shows up 15 minutes later with sweat on his brow and three more clam-shell Dells. We're lucky, the serial numbers on these drives are close enough be the same batch as the broken one. These are a better match than the drives we already found. So we now have the one failed drive and three good ones. I go shopping to pick up items needed for the potential data recovery methods. I purchase some dry ice, a couple of torque bits and eyeglass screwdriver to fit, ziplock bags, and microfiber gloves from a photography shop. I try to make arrangements with a buddy who works in a chip fabrication plant to use their clean room if needed. That was impossible but he was able to get me a couple of those dust free bunny suits and face masks. Unfortunately they were pink. But this was war so I did not complain.

The first thing I try is swapping the PCB between a good drive and the failed one. The good drive works fine with the failed drive's PCB, but the opposite is not true. Next we tried putting the drive in a USB enclosure and plastic bags and cooling the drive with the dry ice. After 1/2 hour we tried again, again without success. I then tried powering the drive and kinda spinning it back and forth hoping to jump start the motor (or something?). Needless to say that was not working. We needed to open the drive up and see what secrets might be inside. We took apart one of the three good drives to see if it was even possible to do a platter swap. I've taken apart many drives and knew the most difficult part would be not damaging the heads. Sometimes you have to remove the arms holding the heads to even get the platter out. But luck was on our side! The arm in these particular drives could be pushed down and would not get in the way when we pulled the platters! Even better they smoothly went back onto the platters without hanging when you carefully pushed it back.

I dawned the bunny suit, much to the delight of the other nerds, and took the drive and tools into the bathroom. I set an audiobook playing and started scrubbing wall to ceiling with wet rags to collect all the dust I could. I taped over the air vent and along the door frame. Then I collected hot water into a trash can and added the dry ice. That much dry ice in that small room made quite a bit of fog which supposedly helps bring any dust out of the air. I don't know if this actually works, but I was concerned about adding that much CO2 into a small sealed room. I made it a point to hold my breath if I was reaching down to the floor. After the fog was gone I noticed no ill effects and proceeded to phase 3.

The actual platter swap went without incident and hardly warrants description in this story. Just a few screws and aluminum spacer rings. I just tried to line up the two platters so they were aligned the same way relative to each other in the new case. Obviously I could not get nearly the same level of precision at the physical scale of the data on the drive, but I did the best I could.

We held our breath while we booted up the bench PC with a Linux data recovery live CD. It found the drive! I started to read an image from the drive, which seemed to work fine. I did a typical data recovery on the image and I FOUND FILES!!! I actually recovered that data! The customer was thrilled and didn't blink an eye at the bill (something like $700) or the fact we destroyed the other drives in the other PCs. I even got a $100 tip for risking O2 deprivation and the ridicule of my peers. That evening we had pizza and Mountain Dew paid for out of the register. I kicked butt at Counter Strike. My wife called to say my Mother in Law was not able to visit after all. It was the perfect day.