Slave A Laptop Hard Drive To USB

This article and video will show you how to use a USB enclosure to slave a laptop hard drive. Many times laptop - notebook hard disk drives come in here that we are able to recover with data recovery software. This video will help you use a USB enclosure to get data off of a failing laptop hard drive.

Hard Drive Recovery Video Series - How To Slave a Laptop Hard Drive

If you have a clicking hard disk drive chances are you need hard drive recovery and slaving your laptop will not help you get your files back. This method is for hard drives that are still recognized by the BIOS, they just don’t show you your data, or let you access it.

The software that you need to recover your data is dependent upon the Operating System that was on your laptop.

• For Windows XP or Microsoft Vista with NTFS File System use DART XP - this program will scan your laptop drive and show you the files that can be recovered before you actually buy the software. You can download the demo version for FREE without having to sign up for anything. DART XP Data Recovery Software. If the scan shows you the data you want, you can purchase it right through the software interface.
• For All other types of Windows or for external hard drives that are running NTFS, FAT, FAT 32 or FAT 16 you will need Recover It All. The Demo version also is FREE and will show you the data before you buy it. You can save the scan and purchase the sofrtware off of our website. Like all our products you don’t have to register it to get the demo and will receive the full version within seconds of purchasing it. Click here for the demo of Recover It All Data Recovery Software.

All of our data recovery software is guaranteed to work or you get your money back. Just like our data recovery services which are No Fix No Fee, we will show you your data before you buy!

DTI also has extended software support. Our software support people work right here in Florida. We don’t outsource anything ever! Our support phones are answered from 9 AM EST to 10 PM EST at 727-345-9665, if you are calling after normal business hours choose the software tech support option with your phone.

Remember if you need hard drive recovery DTI has the best support in the business, a class 100 clean room and a strict no data no charge policy on hard drive recovery. When it comes to laptop data recovery, DTI Data is second to none!

RAID Configuration and Parity Check

The function set for the inaugural offering of RAID Diagnostic Toolkit is very basic. This post will explain how to choose a set of ’streams’ to build a ‘RAID set’. Initially the software does not have any options for stripe size, raid type, meta data offsets, so on and so forth. For the ‘parity check’ function which this current version of this software offers, the assumptions will be a RAID 5, with a 64K stripe size, with no meta data. In future releases of the software these, and many other options will be added in order to make a more robust diagnostic tool.

First we must populate the RAID with streams. There are basically two types of streams that we will use, the first is a physical data stream or ‘hard drive’. The second is an image data stream or ‘file’. Figure A depicts populating the ’stream list’ with physical streams. As you can see the ‘Populate Stream List’ menu item is highlighted. Clicking on this will poll all hard drives on the local machine and display them as shown in Figure B.

Figure A

Figure B

The best way to test an array is to make images of the hard drives and then use the images for testing. From the ‘Configuration’ menu option click on “Add File Stream To List”. A standard Windows file selection dialog box will appear. Go to the proper folder and choose the image that you would like to add to your stream list. Click on the file, and then open and the file will be added to your stream list. You are now free to add this item into your RAID Configuration list.

In order to add an item from the stream list into the RAID Configuration simply double-click on the stream list item and it will be added into the RAID Configuration list of items as depicted in Figure C.

Figure C

Next, in order to start the parity test click on the menu item “Diagnostics”. Doing so will reveal the menu item “Raid Five Parity Check”. Click on that menu item and the diagnostic will begin. This function will check the RAID five on a stripe by stripe basis and validate the parity using XOR mathematics.

In the lower left hand corner of the software is a small status/information window that offers real time data of the parity scan. this window contains five items which describe the state of the diagnostic.

Type: The configured RAID/River type

Ident: Identifier give to the RAID/River type

Block: The block, currenty being scanned by the software

Time: Time remaining till the scan has completed.

Errors: The total blocks that a parity error has been found.

Two of the five items are most pertinent for this particular function. They are the “Errors” item and the “Block” item. If the “Error” item is ten to fifteen percent of the array then the array stripe is probably corrupt and you may have a stale drive in the array. For all practical purposes however, there should be less that or a total of three or four total errors for the entire array. A healthy array will have no errors and if even only one appears that could mean either the hardware is starting to fail, or worse, the firmware and or its accompanying memory me be buggy. Either scenario could spell disaster for your array and should be looked at immediately. View Figure D as an example.

Figure D

Finally, if you wish to interrupt the diagnostic just click on the “Configuration” menu item, and then the “Interrupt Processing” item and all processing will stop.

That’s it! Of course you must always bear in mind that even if the RAID does not pass the parity test there may still be data to recover. Alternatively if it does pass, this does not necessarily mean that the RAID is good for a rebuild. There will be other functions added to the software that will help you better determine if a rebuild is advisable.

Dick Correa

MFT Data Recovery

   Over the years I have recovered many drives configured with NTFS.  One of the leading reasons that data recovery is performed on these hard drives is an anamoly developed in the Master File Table.  This area of the drive is the single most important set of data stored on your system.  The Master File Table houses all attributes, as well as cluster placement for every file on your system.  It contains security attributes, file name attributes, date and time signatures, and a mini FAT called a run list that points to every cluster where a  particular file is stored.

  In addition to the infomation stored in the Master File Table it has been my experience that if a previous copy of the Master File Table had been saved off into a file onto a remote site I could have easily imported that file and used it to recover the data.  In other words, it is rarely the occasion that an entire file system gets totally wiped out.  It is usually some small piece of information either corrupted or omitted from the Master File Table that causes the problem.  Even a restore disk used on a hard drive that totally destroys all remnants of a file system cannot keep a backup copy of the Master File Table from recovering some data.

  How, you may ask can this be?  Well grasshopper, read on and see.  Imagine a book.  A reference book preferably.  Now, let us define the attributes of a reference  book.  Lets see, there is a forward where the author may offer a few remarks so we know how intelligent he is.  There is a table of contents that give you a general idea of what is in the book and where it is located. There is the body of the book, the actual information.  Last but not least, an index.  A detailed description, with page numbers that tell you exactly where the data is that you are looking for. For illustration purposes we can  say that the index of the book is the Master File Table, and the body of the book is the data on your hard drive.  If the index of the book is ripped out of the back, how would it be possible to find the information you are looking for?  I suppose you could wade through the entire book and possibly, after several hours of searching, find the answers you are looking for.  I have done that with some of my older books where the back, and the front of the book have disappeared.   A book may have 200, 300, 400, maybe even 500 pages to look through, and if the information is important enough it is worth the look.  However, wouldn’t it have been easier if I would have just photo copied the index and placed that in a nice safe place.  Then, when the book gets old, and I lose the index, I have this nice copy that I have kept to help me find my information.

   Leafing through a 500 page book may be time consuming but it is feasible, however, apply that same logic of the index and the book to a hard drive.  Who wants to scan through 234,000,000 sectors looking for data.  If the data is fragmented then the data is probably lost.  Wouldn’t have been nice to have a copy of the Master File Table to use and find all of your old tax returns, or doctoral thesis, or the only pictures of your grandsons birth?  I would say, “Yeah!! It would’ve been nice!”. 

  Please don’t get the wrong idea.  This is not the same as entire backup, on another set of media.  There are holes to this system.  First, if the drive actually goes bad, then it will be difficult if not impossible to get the data back.  Secondly, any thing that writes to the data portion of the drive will make the Master File Table useless. However, it takes a long time to destroy a 250 GB  hard drives data area.  Lastly, I have not been able to find a piece of software that just dumps the Master File Table to a remote site.  Looks like someone should write one?

PC World Reviews DTI Data!

DTI Data Recovery is proud to announce that it’s Free NTFS Partition Repair software was positively reviewed by PC World! You can read the article on PC World’s website here.

Hopefully this data recovery software will help you recover your data. 

If you have any questions email support@dtidata.com or call 727-345-9665 Ext 236. If you need data recovery, give DTI a call.

Fujitsu 500 GB Hard Drive

Ok here is another review of a new Fujitsu hard drive from my personal fave in hard drive manufacturers. This is really kind of awesome, a 2.5” half terabyte drive. I don’t know how you can go wrong with that. It only uses minimal power, 1.8W for read write, because of the Fujitsu’s Green Policy Innovation Program. It is a SATA 3.0/Gbs which makes it great for data transfer and storage. It runs at 4200 rpm which is a bonus in my book, those super high speed drives seem to fail all the time.

Now, whether that is because it is just too fast or because of the heat that it generates I am unsure but I know the fail rate is much higher on those 9k rpm drives. They are listing the seek time at around 13 milliseconds. I think these drives would be perfect for using in an external USB chassis since it is likely they are not going to run to hot. I should probably note that this is also the largest laptop drive out there now. I know that this will please all of you power laptop users. My husband is always out of disk space on his Dell, and I think this will make a great Father’s Day gift! Because the drive was only released on February 25^th there are no real reviews out there and we haven’t gotten any in for hard drive recovery, so if anyone has one of these big boys let me know what you think.

Western Digital My Passport Essential USB Drive: A Sleek New Portable

I think I have mentioned before that Western Digital is one of my favorite hard drive manufacturers. I was reading around on the Internet today and came across this. It is really a sweet little portable drive. With a max capacity of 320Gb and only weighing in at 5 ounces it is an awesome answer to all of the huge files need to move around now.

I am a little concerned about heat on this guy though, and would not recommend running it all the time. It would be best to just plug it in when you need to do your data transfers. It is not in need of a power source either, because it is powered by your USB port. I tried to look and see if anyone is talking about problems they have had with it and the only negative I could find was people thought the price should be lower. On this point I have to disagree, you can get the 320 for 200 bucks on their site, so I am sure there is a deal to be found on them. They come with special encryption software, as well as synchronization software. This can be very useful if you are transporting a PST file between 2 places (i.e. home and work). It is USB 2.0 compliant so you will get transfer rates around 450 to 480(MAX) Mbps. Let me know guys if you have any trouble with this hard drive.

Feel free to contact us if you need hard drive recovery on a My Passport or any other type of storage media.

Maxtor Shared Storage II and the Release of Central Axis

So in an effort to make our data available to us from anywhere Maxtor/Seagate has come up with a really cool idea. The Maxtor Shared Storage II line, which comes in 500 GB and 1 TB, now has the ability to allow users to log into a safe Internet browser site and gain access to their network attached storage (NAS) from anywhere.

You don’t need any special downloads or installs. Also there is no reason to open ports on your firewall or router to gain access to your data. I found this idea to be a long time coming, and think it is awesome that Maxtor is offering it free of charge with this line of NAS device. In the past I have expressed my dislike in the decline of what in the early 90’s was the Caddy of hard drive lines, and finally I think Seagate is moving that area of the company in the right direction.

I know I personally spend a lot of time out of the office and have found it difficult even with having a PDA/Phone to be able to gain access to my files I need to email easily. I am seriously considering the purchase of this product in the near future and will let you all know how that works out. I am very interested to see how the transfer rates are and if the ease of use is really what they are touting it to be. If anyone has one of these devices let me know what you think.

Seagate Momentus Hard Drive Recovery Review

The Seagate Momentus® 5400.4 hard drive recovery review.
At the end of January, Seagate started shipping the much talked about Momentus® 5400.4 hard drive. This drive is the newest in a line of laptop hard drives they have been developing. It uses a second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. Which means instead of storing the data in conventional ‘longitudinal’ magnetic recording, in which the bits are directed circumferentially along the track direction, they are storing them perpendicular pointing up and down to the track.

What is good about this is the ability to get much higher storage as they can stack the data. On a laptop hard drive that means huge storage capacity never before seen. The 5400.4 is a 250 gig hard drive using SATA 300 and running at 5400 rpm. I did a lot of reading about this drive and really haven’t been able to find anything positive or negative about it. It is mass shipping to laptop manufacturers and I will update the status as soon as it is in the hands of the masses. Let us know if you have any questions about hard drive recovery by leaving a comment in this post.

The Decline Of Data Recovery Services

After the fallout of the tech boom of the late 1990’s, Internet marketers had few money making options left. The get rich quick scheme based on a potentially good idea was no longer feasible. However, one market did stand alone, unwavering; the data recovery services and software industry.

Prior to the new millennium there were only a handful of legitimate data recovery companies. Data recovery was expensive and a necessity in certain situations. With an expensive necessity, the new Internet marketers made their way into the data recovery industry.

To date the amount of data recovery companies has increased exponentially over the last 5 years. How did all of these companies emerge with a claim of decades of experience? The truth is, more than likely, that they are not qualified to do any type of data recovery other than logical system failures that can be performed with data recovery software.

Companies making claims to recover data from any drive, regardless of size from $199.00 to $300.00 is unrealistic. In reality, if they were to exhaust every option of recovery on each drive they would quickly become bankrupt.

Data recovery from internal failures of the hard drives read/write heads can be quite costly in parts alone for a data recovery company. Do the math. Let’s say we have a 250GB Hard drive with malfunctioning read/write heads. The data recovery company would need to replace the read/write heads. This constitutes an expenditure on the behalf of the data recovery company equal to the price of a 250GB hard drive. Let us also assume that the platters have acquired damage in an area that originally caused the head crash, which has now caused the replacement read/write heads to crash. The defective area on the platter is noted and avoided after another head replacement. Again, another cost acquired by the data recovery company equal to the cost of the 250GB hard drive.

So indicative of the math there is no way for a data recovery company to stay in business using this business model.

At DTI Data Recovery we offer flat rate pricing on the majority of hard drive recovery. The only exceptions are on RAID systems. DTI also offers a no data no charge policy on the majority of hard drive recoveries. Again the only exceptions are on RAID systems or if the hard drive was opened outside of our clean room. Don’t be fooled by companies that offer low prices on physical data recovery. On the other side, there is no reason whatsoever for a company to not give a flat rate price on single hard drive data recovery! Companies that quote prices in a range from $500 to $3500 will more than likely to charge as much money as they think that you will pay for data recovery.

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

Why Use Data Recovery Experts

Why Use Data Recovery Experts? Before attempting any form of self data recovery from information gathered from web sites that offer suggestions about hard drive recovery, you need to be informed about what data recovery is and why it takes an expert with a clean room for most data loss scenarios that involve repairing a hard drive.

Do it yourself Hard Drive Repair & the Risks

What is the problem?
Does the drive spin?
If so does it click?
Does the armature kick out?
Do the drives heads vibrate to initiate?
Is there an odd smell to the drive?
If it doesn’t spin do you here a slight or faint ticking sound?
Does the BIOS see the drive?
Does the BIOS see the drive as the correct model?
Are there funny characters showing on boot?
Does the operating system blue screen?

Important things you should be aware of before you do anything to a suspected failed hard drive
Static discharge will kill a hard drive when handling… especially the internal components Dust will destroy your data… DO NOT OPEN!

In my experience I see so many hard drives destroyed by helpful neighbors when the problem was not situated internal of the hard drive assembly. Just because it clicks doesn’t always represent an internal failure.

Swapping the electronics runs the risk of further damage, especially if the revision number of the PCB is different. You will have a greater success of recovery with less risk if the original electronics is repaired.

Full Diagnostic Imaging This is a bit by bit, sector by sector cloning operation of a failing hard drives with bad sector reporting & remapping System Area Repair at Manufacturing Levels The system area of a hard drive is NOT common knowledge.

This is an area of the hard drive that is purely communication between the internal workings of the hard drive assembly (HDDA) & the printed circuit board (PCB)… Unlike data that is stored from track zero, that most commercial data recovery software has access too.

The system area starts at minus zero that proprietary equipment is needed to gain full access to this area for data recovery PCB Chipset Replacement & Reprogramming There is a lot involved when a chip on the printed circuit board that shows signs of failure, this can be caused by a more serious fault or even daisy chain through circuitry when replaced… meaning if you repair one chip it only reveals others that were also affected by the failure Class 100 Dust Filtration Systems Essential for Platter Replacement This is very important if every other diagnostic has pointed to the extraction of the Platters internal of the drive hard disk drive assembly to be removed and reinserted into another matching HDDA.

Any form of contaminants on the platter surface will result on loss of data. but this is not the only precautionary matter, there is platter alignment and balancing to take into account as well. If you mis align a bottom platter to the top platter by a micron it is practically impossible to realign CRC Error Checking Control CRC also known as cyclic redundancy check is where an unreadable bad sector is skipped due to its error reporting system acknowledging that there is an error… if this is disabled there is a higher chance of retaining data Parts The correct parts are sometimes very hard to find… and when you do they are wrong.

One model of a hard drive can be manufactured in three different parts of the world with altered components… yet still retain the same model number, Also a hard drive is very smart; they are designed to work around imperfections of the platters surface.

They will move failing sectors without your knowledge causing what we call a shift point. What this means is there is now unique information hard-coded on the hard drive’s surface that is now unique to the drives electronics. So even if you have the exact printed circuit board with matching numbers on all components, there is no guarantee this will work. If you have suffered data loss and your hard disk is physically damaged, call DTI Data. We are experts at hard drive recovery.

 24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

Extended Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

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