What do 'Data Recovery Professionals' evens do?

[Flashie]

Hi

 

Please understand when I ask what do they do - that I am curious about their means to recovering data from 'failed hard drives'; The process behind all the advertising. 

 

I know about the class 100 clean rooms required to do the job - but what exactly happens in there? 

What process does my drive go through if I was to hand in a 3TB clicking hard drive that isn't detected by Windows or Linux? 

If it's software they use what softwares do they make use of? Do they replace and swap out potentially non working or defective parts of the hard drive with new ones? 

I'm really curious and can't find any articles online except advertisements stating that their company is best for data recovery.

Thanks

[Oryzaki]

They use specialized hardware usually to extract data off the disks if the drive is totally bust other wise they attempt to repair the drive.

[You_are_a_cunt]

They recover data. Professionally.

 

 

Some drives are damaged physically. They stop spinning, have the board damaged, heads get stuck, etc.

They tear them down, take out the platters and transplant them to recover the dataz.

That or they completely rip you off

[Oryzaki]

Just now, revsilverspine said:

They recover data. Professionally.

 

 

Some drives are damaged physically. They stop spinning, have the board damaged, heads get stuck, etc.

They tear them down, take out the platters and transplant them to recover the dataz.

That or they completely rip you off

Yep

[KenjiUmino]

31 minutes ago, Flashie said:

Do they replace and swap out potentially non working or defective parts of the hard drive with new ones? 

i believe that's what they do when software solutions are not successful.

 

that's what i did on an old HDD where the board went up in smoke. lucky for me that i had two of those drives in my system back then so i just swapped over the working board from the other drive. 5 minutes and a very smal torx screwdriver was all it took to get my data back

[SCHISCHKA]

Have you seen the old willy wonka chocolate factory movie. It's just like that. They have midgets who sing all day i an underground bio-dome. If you ask they will deny it. Top secret stuff that you have to be in the know to know.

[Princess Luna]

Isn't the title self explanatory?

 

Or did you mean HOW they do it?

[JacobFW]

Scott Moulk from MyHardDriveDied has quite videos on youtube, as well as his podcast, where he explains quite a bit about how they recover data.  It involves understanding the File System, partitions & boot sectors, the engineering of the hard drive mechanical parts, the hard drive's firmware, etc.

 

Part of the reason for having to know all this is that you really don't want to make the problem worse.  Think about if you have a damaged graphics card, if you hire someone to fix it, but in the process it burns itself out, well that sucks, but they can just get you a new graphics card.

 

But a hard drive is not just a product the manufacturer makes:  it has data, and if you're sending it in for a professional data recovery, it's likely data that you have no other way to replace.  So you have to understand how it works, and understand how it breaks, to minimize data loss as much as possible.