Whoops.

Wow, I've really left this to languish for quite some time. I've had a lot of stuff going on, so I guess I'll put it in backdated. Hopefully within the next few weeks, I have to kind of...remember most of the details.

Been a bit...

Well, there really hasn't been much new and interesting to write about. Lots of the same type of stuff.
Let's see over the past few months...

Had another drive erased by Apple in a dispatch due to a miscommunication (so no one backed it up first), similar situation as last time with the mystery diagnostic partition but sadly was unable to recover anything. Guess I was lucky that time, or they changed their process slightly.

Recovered data from about 5 various LaCie externals. In most cases it was just a blown firewire/usb bridge, and the drives cooperated fine externally, though in one case the drive itself was bad, 90-some bad blocks, and the drive had been FAT-formatted to boot... so I had to do a file-signature type recovery and thus got tons and tons of generically named "Word Document 1" type files...it was one of the little blue square USB-powered drives, think they have a 1.8" iPod-sized HD in them. So, not surprised, and worse is that it had been "acting up for a long time". I captured a dd-image of it, but couldn't do much of anything with it.

Had someone call several times asking if we could recover data from SyQuest disks, prompting me to go drag out the various externals (44/88/200-something) I have, and then never show up.

Helped "fix" someone's iPhone. Really, I can't claim much for that because nowadays you just download programs to do it for you, and she'd started the process of trying to "hack" but halfway-bricked her phone somewhere in the middle since a lot of the instructions on the internet are sort of vague and vary depending on what firmware version you have, plus she was kinda just randomly doing things. Really though, I didn't do much special, other than SCP into the phone to get youtube working for her after undoing some of the (bad) things she'd done and restoring it. She wasn't even trying to do anything terribly exotic like swap SIMs and use it on another carrier, she just stopped using AT&T and wanted to use the iPhone as a glorified Touch but it was continually nagging her and certain things (like youtube) had stopped working, it was stuck in a sort of limbo after she restored it once, the phone knew it had been (once) activated, but iTunes claimed it needed to be, and then kind of stuck her in a loop of pointlessness. I suppose that's how Apple/AT&T wants it though, and to not have too many people with non-activated iPhones wandering around. Dunno.

At the moment I am working on a drive that someone mistakenly formatted NTFS from within windows. They were trying to set up boot camp, and then when the windows setup asked how they wanted to prepare the drive, chose to format the entire device instead of the partition that the Mac side had already created, obliterating the mac-style partition table. This caused a fair amount of problems because disk utility now grays out the drive and doesn't let you do anything to it, and it had some otherwise odd behavior. Currently booted off of a 10.5 CD with terminal open, using diskutil's commandline interface which seems to be working so far.
basically...
using "gpt show disk0" said that it had a bogus map, which makes sense since windows would have instead given it a MBR partition map.
so therefore...
diskutil unmount disk0
diskutil zerodrive disk0
diskutil partitiondisk disk0 1 GPTFormat HFS+ HD 100%

Now waiting for step 2 to complete, one downside of command-line operations...very little feedback on the ongoing completion of processes.
--
Looks like it completed fine, though just to be on the safe side I went into Disk Utility itself (well, rather, the GUI application since I suppose the command-line is still the program "itself") and repartitioned the drive with one HFS+ partition there. Seems to be working as expected other than one little oddity.

Ok, it is. Working fine, that is. Currently reinstalling leopard. There was one little glitch where it was showing a ghost of the old drive in disk utility alongside the new partition, but I assume that's because I kind of went around the back of Disk Utility by doing everything in terminal. Restarting cleared that up and it shows up as it should.

Brick'd

Got in one of these drives for the first time.
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Well, actually. Not really. I've had 3 or 4 of them come in but they were easily accessible through "normal" means that didn't require me disassembling it. This one was making a slight burnt electronics smell and some noises that made me think, well...maybe I ought to try using it externally, in case the bridge is blown, or it is a drive I can swap controllers for.

First thing first though, had to make sure with the customer that he really wanted me to take it apart to attempt to get data. If it was still in warranty, I didn't want to void it. Plus, I wasn't sure if I might mess it up in the process. He was pretty sure it was well out of warranty so I gave it a shot.

Experimentally pulled off a foot thinking there would be screws beneath it, sadly there were none to be found. Flexed the case in my hands and it felt like it was held together somewhat like the mac mini. Series of internal clips and tension. Wielded putty knife used for mac minis on it. Hoped that there wasn't some sort of hidden glue in addition.

After a bit of sliding and prying and coaxing and a tiny bit of tough love, it finally came apart. Stopped in the middle to browse the internet to see if anyone had any tips and couldn't find any evidence of people disassembling them, much less providing instructions, but eventually succeeded.

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So, there it is. A few of the smaller tabs broke, but it feels like it will go back together fine. The drive is held in place in a very odd manner, some bendable tabs and a little more light prying with the putty knife to slip it out of its frame/bracket. Nothing very special.


Now, to actually try and get data. It is reporting immediate read errors for every block of the drive, so I'm going to mess with it a little more...

--
First things first, swap the controller board.

At first I thought "where in the world am I going to find another 300gb Maxtor drive of this model?" (while digging around in a box of dead drives unsuccessfully) But then I remembered I had a dead 300gb d2 drive (dead bridge) under the table. Since most of the LaCie enclosures I've opened lately had Maxtor drives in them, I had hopes for it. ..and I was correct, same exact model/revision, even very, very close manufacture dates.

Alas, it did not help the problem. The drive still spins up, makes a few half-hearted seeking-style noises but that is it. Spoke to the customer and found that it had been "doing this thing" for a while, where the thing was that he'd be using it, it would make a few clicks, stop responding, and then take a few turnings off and on until it worked again. Hmmm.

--
Maxtor DiamondMax 10, Model 6L300P0, 300gb PATA133, 18-Feb-2006

Sometimes I wonder why...

Was going through a few of the things that came in while I was gone. One of them was a 3.5 (Internal) Western Digital. Which had obviously had someone open it. The label was partially missing, torn, and the remaining pieces just sort of stuck back on there. The screws were all slightly gouged, not badly, but typical amount for "I didn't have a torx driver so I jammed some other head in there and turned the screws".


Plugged the drive in and it made a terrible racket of squeals and clatters. Put my finger on the spindle screw and felt it was loose. So loose, in fact, that I could turn it with just my finger tip. Tightened down all of the screws, they were all a full turn to a turn and a half loose, though didn't over-tighten the spindle screw, those are picky. Can't be loose or too tight or else you'll cause problems.

The funny(?) part was that after tightening the screws and fiddling a little I got the drive to show up with minimal effort and backed up all the data (I could find) on the drive.
So, I'm not sure exactly what possessed them to try and disassemble the drive. Although, I guess I'm glad I got to it in time. Once you break the seal, it's kind of like the drive's days are numbered, at least in my experience.

Big, Bigger, Biggest?

Got in two LaCie 2Tb Bigger Disks. Was pretty sure that they were multi-drive RAID, they're the size of shoeboxes. Probably 4 drives.

Well, based on the sound, at least one if not two of the drives in each enclosure have failed. The owner was hesitant at having me open the case since they might still be under warranty, so there's not much to be done. Then again, there's not much to be done with a partially failed raid anyway, since I usually can't get much meaningful data out of an individual drive unless the data happens to be on the first drive, and that it is not the one that has failed. RAID 0 is kind of cool in concept, but it's so...tenuous, it seems. At least when it comes to a probable partial failure.

Been a while...

Well, several months without posts. Mainly, nothing interesting has been happening, and I got a bit bored of writing down the same exact type of information, over and over. Had a run of several drives that were unrecoverable or totally unremarkable in the methods I used. Had a friend bring in a drive (Western Digital Passport, a tiny little thing) she had dropped and couldn't do anything for it as well. Had my SATA adapter and DriveDock both go out within a month of each other. Oh yes, and a bunch of people spilled things on their computers.

Hm, that's about it. Hopefully there will be something of note soon.

Ah, actually...there was one thing of interest. About 3 months ago, I found a DirecTV box with TiVo features built in, outside in a rubbish pile. Having never had TiVo, and the box being dead, I took it apart. Of course, there was a hard drive in it, and the hard drive was working. Now this may have been old news to all the people who have been playing with (and hacking) their TiVo units since they came out, but I had no idea they were Linux-based. So, I had a little enjoyment poking around the drive, looking at various partitions, etc. There were some stored programs on there but all of the information I found was largely inaccessible, it seems that TiVo content is encoded in a certain manner. It is possible to decode with a few modifications to the box, but it requires having the box in functioning shape and connected to a computer.

Ah, well. It was just a passing diversion anyway, finding this information (and watching someone's several years-old recorded shows) wasn't really that important, just the journey along the way.

Such bad luck...

So there's this guy, he's been in here at least 5 times for data recovery. He just has bad luck, it seems. Drives failing, using things formatted the wrong way, the list goes on. This time, though, it was because a friend of his was trying to fix a problem and inadvertently erased the drive....and he didn't just erase it, oh no. He actually restored over it with another drive. (I didn't find this out until spending some time scratching my head over why I could not find any directory fragments other than some for some application files he swore were never installed ont he computer.)

He was very hopeful I could work a miracle, since it was all music-related stuff he had done for his work (it wasn't backed up and could not be replaced without recreating the work and losing the money)

Well, this first thing I did was scavenge the drive based on (known) file types. On a 300gb drive, I found about 120gb of miscellaneous .WAV and .AIF files. Unfornately, each one of these was a clip from his various projects, and there were several thousand of each, all named things like "File ##.AIF". So while his data was here, there was no logical connection between the files and wading through them was daunting to say the least.

After finding out he works in ProTools, I had an idea. I have no familiarity with the program, but I assume it works in one of two ways; it either creates a workspace file that is basically a series of markers and pointers referencing all the pieces of media and how the relate to each other in the overall timeline, or else perhaps there were "finished" files where all of the tracks were combined. Had him bring in a drive with some ProTools files and created a template based on the 20-30 files. Was then able to recover another 40gb or so of files which met characteristics of the provided files. I have no way of verifying if they are in any way valid since I do not have the program, but he is going to come by and get the files onto a drive...considering many of the files are several hundred mb, here's hoping they're the "finished product". I doubt that workspace table-of-contents type files would help when all of your files have random different names.