Data Recovery Ramblings

Whoops.

2009-03-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-06-06T13:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-01-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

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.

(image placeholder)

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...

2008-01-02T14:37:00.001-08:00

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?

2007-12-22T12:24:00.000-08:00

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...

2007-11-24T18:01:00.001-08:00

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...

2007-08-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

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.

FAT revelation, of a sort.

2007-08-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I discovered something today. mount_msdos seems to be much more forgiving than whatever built-in mechanism the finder/disk utility uses (I assumed it was the same, but it seems it isn't).

Had two difficult drives that were FAT32 formatted, coming from a friend's PC that had been laboring under a massive burden of spyware and viruses for a year or so. Ran into a couple problems when I was trying to move all of her files over to a new mac. The Finder would immediately report the drives as being unrecognizable, and Disk Utility would refuse to even run on them. On one, it only recognized it as the raw device (disk3s1), and the other, as FAT16 instead of FAT32 and unmountable and irreparable.

Since I had luck in the past using mount_hfs to mount finicky HFS drives, I decided to try mount_msdos. Had to try once or twice to create the right mount point, and oddly had to sudo it since it claimed that I needed higher privileges to load a module into the kernel, but then...bam, it worked.

The drives both sounded atrocious the whole time though, so I won't be moving either of them into the mac as secondary storage like i originally said she ought to. No no, old Maxtor from 2000. You'll be going in the trash. You too, Western Digital from 2001. Since they're both 20gb drives, it is no big loss...I had thought she had a 100gb drive in the PC.

iPodderies

2007-08-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

Guy came in with a broken iPod. Failing drive, and luckily it was still under warranty, but he needs to get all the music off of it because there are "hundreds and hundreds of dollars of music on there". Make a few passes over the drive after I manage to get it limping along, and I get, eh, 10gb or so of music...but only one .m4p (protected, thus purchased) file. Try and try and try and that is all I could find, even looked at the drive's physical data and it was just...empty, past a certain point.

I'm pretty sure the kid just made it sound a lot more important to his dad, or else, didn't want to admit to (possibly) pirating music. I can't think of another reason why he'd think there was that much purchased music that wasn't there. Perhaps it's possible the drive was just that badly damaged...maybe. Ah well, burned it to DVDs and called it a day.

More adventures with FAT, Part 2

2007-06-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

There are things like this that really make me glad I like Macs. All the time I give the whole "Macs are just easier, blah blah blah" line to people who are all "Oh, ugh, you like Macs"...and then I think, well, maybe I am just biased...and then I have experiences like this that make me go......ugh....
--

So the problems with the PC. Turns out that a fresh copy of Windows XP didn't have 6 or so drivers the computer needed that it was complaining about...modem, ethernet, video card, and a few others I don't remember. Windows had expired itself so I had to call in a phone registration for it since without ethernet, there was no way to get it online to activate it. Then I went to another computer and searched through Gateway's website for their various drivers. Found each one, had a bit of a pain with it because each file was referenced in a support "article" that required clicking through about 8 windows each time in order to download it. Downloaded the firmware update as well since it allegedly fixed some USB issues and USB was one of the things I planned to use on this. Burned everything to a CD and installed it. The firmware update cautioned me that it would take 6 minutes, but immediately upon rebooting gave an error about the CMOS and threw me into BIOS setup. Everything seemed ok, exited out, windows booted and it said everything was updated. Huh. Ah, well. Couldn't run it again because it was allegedly now up to date..and then the machine crashed.

However, I was still having two devices that were complaining about not being present and the computer would periodically lock up after dismissing the "please locate this driver" dialog box a few times. However, since I was now able to get online on this computer I did so. First going directly to Mozilla's website to download Firefox. Then googled the message I was getting. The first 20 or so results all directed me to various "pay us for advice" type pages. I was then able to determine that they were drivers for the onboard chipsets. Took a trip to Intel's website.
In order to find out what driver to download, I first needed to download a utility to identify what chipset I had, since I couldn't find this information on the computer or Gateway's website, or with google, or by just browsing Intel's site. Went through 3 different versions of said utility until I found one that would run and identify the chipset. So then I downloaded those drivers and the computer finally stopped complaining at startup.

Until I put PCI cards into the machine.

The machine already had the modem card in it, which I had left in since it came with the machine. It also had a Belkin 802.11g card which I had pulled out during the initial run of missing driver errors...and I now wanted to put a combo FireWire/USB2 card in here for dealing with iPods, drives, etc. Well, I put the Belkin card in and the FW/USB card in and installed their drivers. Or at least, that was the plan. Upon restarting with the Belkin card, modem, and IOGear card in, the USB) mouse and keyboard stopped working. I tried moving the cards around the slots just for good measure, but finally just decided to leave the Belkin card out, there was really no need to put wireless in and if it helped cut down on incompatibilities...

Well, after a lot of trial and error, I finally got it working. Mostly. Our office uses manual IP assignment (mainly because we have a cisco router that is badly in need of replacement) and somehow, even though the ethernet port is on the main board, each time I moved the PCI cards around it reassigned it as "Ethernet 10/100somethingorother Interface #(1,2,3) and thus would not let me give it the same IP address because a "hidden or disabled interface had the same address" after hunting all over the computer including the freakin registry I finally just gave up and assigned it yet another IP address. Sadly, windows began to complain that I changed my computer too much and I had to reactivate it. Then I finally got around to installing Norton.

Piece. of. crap.
It is easily 1000x times more bloated than the Mac version, which is saying a lot.
I had to go through a quasi-installation process several times. At first I tried to run it off the CD since it gave that option but it kept not working right. Then I installed it. and restarted. and updated. and restarted. and repeat repeat repeat. Then it told me that I needed to put the CD back in the computer for some needed resources. and it installed itself again. and restarted. and again. and restarted. Eventually it quieted down only for me to notice that there was tons of ridiculous crap I couldn't turn off or disable without them immediately reactivating themselves. Even though I disabled all of the FileSaver and runs-all-the-time features Norton still decided to build several dozen megs of indexes and invisible files on the drive I was trying to recover from. Argh. And to make matter worse, it didn't do a single thing to help my situation, and trying to remove it was like trying to pick up marbles with a butter knife.

Eventually I found a free undeleting program called, of all things "FreeUndelete". It seems to be working ok other than the fact that it crashes out after several gigabytes of recovery because windows starts complaining about a lack of RAM (even though I put 768mb in here and gave it free reign on the swapfile).

Here's hoping I finish this all within the next day or so. Windows graciously informed me that I used up all of my activations and need to purchase a new license key, and it will kill itself in the next 3 days if I don't do so.

EDIT: I waded through MS's website until I found a FAQ where it recommended I call in since the license allegedly allows unlimited activations even if you keep changing your hardware, you just have to call it in and answer a few questions (to an automated system). Did so, and it's working again...for now. Even though one of the main FAQ responses was something like "If you took this to a repair shop, they may have installed a pirated copy of windows, here's how to buy our $99 genuine windows key"...I'm wondering how many gullible people just go the easy route and pay them more money. ::sigh:: anyway, it's just as well because there were about 65 security updates to install, and knowing windows, there will be countless more after these are done. But at least I don't have a pseudo-deadline when the OS is going to suicide on me.

So yeah. Windows? You are so totally lame sometimes.

I'm not even getting into the spyware that managed to infest the computer from going to websites, mostly manufacturer websites but a few PC help type sites, trying to get things straightened out. I installed the usual mix I recommend to PC users, Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, SpywareBlaster. Norton's stuff it installed seems to be basically useless other than bogging down the machine.

--
Oh yeah, and I'll talk about the actual recovery next, I swear. I just had to get that off my chest, yeah. Something like that.

More adventures with FAT, Part 1

2007-06-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Had a drive come in. Kinda cool looking, very slim aluminum case, "Acomdata" I believe is the brand.
However, the issue was that the drive had come from the manufacturer FAT32 formatted and the customer had just started using it right out of the box. Since OSX allows storing of Mac files on FAT-formatted volumes without any complaint, many people do this and have problems...usually, the only thing people notice right off the bat is the slowness, although sometimes you get the "my mac files all turned into generic icons" when you are moving them between more than one computer.

Anyway, point being, he started to have problems when he filled the drive up most of the way (this is a 120gb drive., This is also fairly normal because of the limitations on FAT for files and such...presumably...it's the best theory I have as to why FAT-formatted drives die when you fill them past a certain point, the way mac files get stored on foreign file systems can turn what seems to be a single file into dozens of small files due to resource forks and packages and whatnot.

The big problem though, was when he tried to run repair utilities on it. Mac repair utilities. I'm not sure what sequence of things were run on it - Disk Utility is generally sort of smart about running on non-Mac drives - but whatever happened made the drive think that there was nothing on it. The usual tricks and tools I use, I have discovered to be fairly useless on FAT-formatted drives. There are a few programs that do work, but they recover based on the file contents and will yield thousands of unnamed files organized by type, many of which are often useless or unreadable. These were only going to be a last resort option due to the sheer amount of data he had on there. Of course, for good measure the first thing I did was recover the data in this fashion before trying anything else. Yielded ~30 gigabyte...which considering how much he thought he had filled the drive, wasn't a very good result.

So, I decided to give it a shot on a PC...maybe I'd have better luck trying my tactics from the OS that the filesystem was native to...I mean, it shouldn't be that different, I know PCs decently well, and we happened to have a Gateway here that was in working order that I had been trying to get going a few months ago for situations just like this (also to administer the Avaya system and add an online voicemail access feature that needs a PC gateway). All it had needed was a new hard drive, and it had a freshly installed copy of Windows XP on it...there was some hurdle I had run into previously, but figured I could work it out now. Asked around and one of the guys here who has a PC at home will bring in a copy of Norton Utilities. After all, that's great for situations like this on Windows too, right?

But uh. Yeah. I was pretty much in for a very obnoxious process. More in Part 2.

Adventures with FAT32

2007-06-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

Customer brought in an external drive. Cute little thing, small, black, obviously a notebook size drive in a super-slim enclosure. Powered via FireWire. Bought it from somewhere. "The internet".

Well, it was windows (FAT32) formatted. He filled it up with a bunch of stuff from his work PC and his home mac. Did a lot of copying back and forth. Eventually it just stopped working, stopped showing up when he plugged it in. His PC friend told him that his solution would be to format it NTFS, thank goodness he couldn't figure out a way to do that from the Mac...I think he thought that would actually somehow bring back the files. Ah well. as able to get it mounting again with some basic directory repairs using Disk Utility. Super slow to access. Talked to him and decided the best option was to copy all his files off, reformat it HFS, copy the files back and be done with it. His main needs to copy stuff off of the PC were now over now that he had all of that stuff backed up, and he's just going to use a USB thumb drive to copy files here and there. Sounds like a good solution to me.

I wish there was some sort of message that MacOS X would put up, you know, like "FAT32 is not optimal for this machine. Please consider reformatting before copying all of these files to it"...or something like that. Then again, that sounds sort of like an annoying message too. Eh, I dunno. If they just kept it locked like NTFS, they wouldn't need to worry about it. But then again, PC Exchange has been around since the 90s. I don't think Apple's going to disable or cripple it any time soon.

It's not data recovery, but...

2007-06-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Well, another adventure in...exploring, so to speak. Geeky exploring.

So yeah. Xerox, in their infinite wisdom, decided to sell a low-end printer, the 3150, and list it as being Mac-compatible (or did previously, as I can't find the mention of it now, but I checked before as I was the one that sold this particular printer to this customer a few months ago), and even ship with a CD with the "Mac Installer" on it.

What they don't state explicitly, is that said Mac compatibility is only if you got the optional $200 upgrade to convert it from USB-only to Ethernet, and give it PostScript in the process, The basic ($350) USB model is PCL only.

PCL and PostScript, of course being the languages that printers use to process the information you send to them, created by HP and Adobe accordingly, for anyone who didn't know.

So anyway, trying to print to this model using the driver (or rather PPD) they provided yields pages and pages of gibberish...because the installer they included was assuming it was a PostScript printer, and sending invalid code to it.

Customer called Xerox and they said "Oh, yeah. Your mac doesn't have the language to talk to this printer."
So helpful.
Now, I'd been the one that sold it to him and had assured him it would work, and after talking to him over the phone I assured him I could get it working and the guy didn't know what he was talking about, because, well, there's tons of printers Macs can print to that use PCL.
Well, a little investigation on the internet yielded absolutely no PPDs made for this printer or a one-digit-off model. (PPDs essentially being a file that tells the computer how to setup the printer, and to print to it.)

A little searching and asking around gave a handful of people complaining about the same situation and unhelpful Xerox. Some people had gotten the printer to work by simply using the HP LaserJet driver since it's a PCL driver, but there were some downsides in that certain features didn't work, certain situations and printouts would seemingly lockup the printer, generally just not a good solution. Plus, it only seemed to work reliably under OS 10.4, and this guy was running 10.3. So then I decided to get my hands dirty with geekery.

First I took the HP LaserJet PPD. Then I opened up the Xerox PPD and started copying over the various features, input trays, RAM configurations, resolution, paper handling, embedded fonts, etc. Got what looked like a usable PPD and gave it a try. (and then about 25 more while I tried various tweakings, including the discovery that OSX greatly prefers its PPDs gzipped instead of as a loose text-file). Still, it continued to try and print to PostScript, giving pages of crap, no matter what I tried and how explicitly (I thought) the PPD said it wasn't PS.

Did a little research and found that, at the very least under 10.3 (I'm not sure about CUPS under 10.4), there is no real PCL processing backend for the print system. By default it assumes PS, and will process print jobs into PS as it goes, if it doesn't have an interpreter on the OS end. Found a slew of options, basically a ton of open source additions for the Unix side of OS X that would add said feature (Gutenprint, Ghostscript, even updates to the system OS X uses, CUPS/GIMP) However, these required extra configuration to set up and possibly maintain, were not necessarily intuitive, and should something stop working the customer might not be able to fix it on his own, and I doubted anyone would over the phone either.

So. My next option was to try and find an existing driver that did PCL processing, that also was at least similar-ish to the printer. I thought I remembered hearing that the low-end Xeroxes were using the same engine as Samsung printers, I decided to take that route. Found a package and downloaded it. Dug around in the contents and broke apart the .plugin packages until I found the file I needed, copied a few miscellaneous bits, then referenced them in my hacked up PPD.

Then the "fun" part was referencing back to some of the Xerox bits and cutting out some Samsung bits in the interpreter file, since at heart it was a compiled UNIX binary I had to poke around very carefully with a hex editor. There were a bunch of lines that were hard-coded pathnames to shared libraries and other files it used that I needed to change, and due to the nature of the situation (the strings didn't seem to have length bytes anywhere I could find) I had to get a little creative with naming in order to use the exact same amount of characters.

There were a few "extra" parts that I am going to try and mess with tomorrow. I did get creative at the end and actually go through and put in different icons and change the references to Samsung to Xerox.
(I changed the internal driver naming from "Samsung SPL" to "Xerox PCL Bridge" since...yeah, just enough letters, and it did show up in one or two places in the print settings. This was mainly to keep the customer from getting confused.)
Interestingly enough Samsung must have built their interpreter off of a HP driver as there were a ton of references to DeskJets including some unused crappy-looking icons.

The end result? It worked. I got a "driver" that printed pages of text and bitmap images reliably and consistently. For all appearances, it looks like a legitimate driver, and if it ever breaks there are only 2 items he (or anyone else) would need to copy back onto the computer, the PPD and the directory with the rest of the hacked modified supporty-bits it calls out to. I doubt I am going to put it up on the internet or anything, since...yeah, it's basically code mashed together from 3! different companies' print drivers. I doubt they'd be incredibly thrilled.
It's essentially a really ghetto, featureless, black and white RIP, I suppose.

But! I did show that I could, indeed, follow through and get this guy's printer working, and show up lame Xerox for not including the driver and saying that it was the Mac's fault for "not having the language". Normally, I wouldn't waste a bunch of hours on something so.....well, ok. yeah. I would, I waste time on oddball things like that all the time, what am I saying. I'm weird like that. Especially when I would have been otherwise bored at work, I can get strangely fixated on figuring things out sometimes. Guess cause it's a challenge, or something? Dunno. It really wasn't that much a challenge, tho...just a time waster. :/

In the process I learned a whole lot about PCL, PJL, TBCP, and PPDs thanks to some incredibly informative but tedious datasheets. There really is no such thing as a standard PPD for a PCL-only printer, which was something I wasn't aware of; even though PPD stands for "postscript printer description" I had assumed that, I don't know, somehow you could also address a PCL printer in it as well. But pretty much all of the PCL printers I looked at that had existing (standard) PPDs were also capable of PostScript emulation.

The rest of the printers had specially crafted PPDs for systems like CUPS, which expand upon the PPD concept with additional options. So it's basically necessary to have some sort of backend that does the rasterizing, which...yeah. I mean, it's obvious now. At the time though, I didn't quite grasp that.

--
Ok, added/changed some additional references within the files to enable two other print options, the ability to switch between 300 and 600 dpi and the manual and automatic feed options, within the print dialog. Both of these were also embedded within print plugins (with obnoxious hardcoded paths as well). The 3150 *does* allow 1200dpi image quality printing, but 300/600 should be fine for text printing which is the entirety of what will be printed on here. I just wanted to make sure image printing was working fine in case, you know...he did try at some point, may as well make sure things are working.

Busy busy.

2007-06-02T08:04:00.001-07:00

Well, a month without posting. Been busy, but everything has either been rush-rush and haven't sat down to blog about it because I was in a rush to get it done and out, or else it was just...really, really unremarkable.

Today's is another 2.5" Toshiba from a PB 15" (Aluminum).

Typical in every way. Stopped being reliable, started getting slow, stopped booting, wasn't showing up to tools, read more reliably standing on its end, started making horrible noises after a short while (but I got all the data off just in time). Hey, I guess I'm getting good at summarizing into one long run-on sentence.

--
Toshiba MK8025GAS / HDD2188 "PLUTA" 80gb 2.5" ATA (655-1113A Apple OEM)

Another LaCie (sort of.)

2007-05-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

Got a 500gb LaCie Big Disk Extreme to work on. Customer had the request of "even if you can't get anything else, get this folder cause it's important". Described as making "some funny noises".
Plug it in and it's making one of the typical failed drive cacophonies. Squealy-zippy-clunky-ringy. You know, that one. Heh.

Anyway, pulled it out of the enclosure and it's actually a pair of Maxtor drives, chained together...I forgot that a lot of the big disks were two drives in a RAID (or more, I think lacie may have had some 3-4 drives as well at some point)

Well, that sucks. Seems like only one of the drives has failed, at least, the other one wasn't making a horrible racket. Right now I'm seeing if I can somehow recover something from the semi-working drive. Hopefully it's just simple raid 0 spanning and not striping or something exotic, I can't remember offhand what they did.

--
(2x) Maxtor 7Y250P0STD MaXLine Plus II 250gb 3.5 ATA [Datecode 30MAY2006, 08DEC2006]

Thank you, SMART.

2007-05-03T12:58:00.000-07:00

Drive showed up for me to do a backup on. Routine diagnostic for some other problem and it started throwing up S.M.A.R.T "pending failure" errors. Drive was really sluggish during the copying, had to coax it along in a few spots, but seems like I got everything...and then shortly afterwards, it just totally conked out. So, uh...thank you for that advance warning, it was right on the money. (Then again, I don't know how long it may have been giving that alert behind the scenes with the customer not knowing)

--
Quantum Fireball Plus AS QMP20000AS-A 20.5gb 3.5 ATA

At least it's got a reason?

2007-05-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

Customer dropped their machine while they were using it. Drive fails to read or even spin up (just makes some atrocious noises). Tried a different controller, and in a few different machines for good measure (in the hopes that maybe if it wasn't showing up externally, it might on an internal bus)...no luck.

--
Fujitsu MHT2040AT 40gb 2.5 ATA (655-1173A Apple OEM) [Datecode 2005-05]

A scribbled note...

2007-04-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

A drive, without any paperwork, but a handwritten note was left for me on my desk.
"Try to get email and convert to slave"

No one seemed to know what email program he was using, but I assumed the second part meant he wanted to use it as a secondary drive...why you would want an 8 year old 6gb drive as a secondary drive is beyond me, but I've seen stranger requests. The one interesting thing was that the drive seemed to have only been used with OS9, I had copied the contents of the drive the normal way when I noticed something odd. A few folders contained the same file over and over. There should not be three files with identical names occupying the same directory. Also, a few files did the old disappearing trick when I started messing with them. So, I decided to run a check on it.

Whoo. Massively trashed directories, tons of crosslinked files, you name it. When it was all said and done though, it turns out that there was an OS X install on there, complete with several users and a bunch of data. Good thing I looked a little deeper, I guess. Still no idea which email he wanted, it looked like he was using both Apple Mail and two versions of Entourage. Ah well, got them all.

Also made a note that I felt the drive was too flaky to use for anything, it was very sluggish and giving errors throughout the entire process of trying to get the drive up and going to get the files off.

--
Maxtor 90680U2 6gb 3.5 ATA 655T0016 [Datecode 26 NOV 1999]

More laptop drives

2007-04-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

Well, another Fujitsu drive. Computer (a 17" PowerBook G4) abruptly stopped booting up, after having some really bad performance, you know, the usual.

The drive is cooperating somewhat. There are a few big 'patches' of bad data, which not only stops it dead during the recovery, but makes the drive just go silent and not respond to the computer until it is unplugged and plugged back in.
The biggest 'bad' area was in the Music folder, several gigabytes of music, some of which was purchased, can not be read at all...and then, a few other locations around the drive, in /System/Library, in the Developer Tools, nothing big though. The music seems to be the biggest part, I suppose it must have been the most recent? All of the /Library/Caches seem to be affected as well, but those are fairly unimportant in the grand scheme. Lots of cp and dd sprinkled with normal-type copying and such.

Got to get this finished up by the end of the day since I'll be gone over the weekend.

--
Fujitsu MHS2060AT 60gb 2.5 ATA (655-1055 Apple OEM) [Date 2003-05]

More floppies.

2007-04-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

Got some more 3.5" 800k floppies to "convert", i.e. copy the files off, convert to a recent format, and burn to a CD.
Only 4 this time, and they cooperated with only a few intermittent errors, and converted fine, but from speaking to the guy, he may very well bring in "a lot more" I don't know if this means 20, or a hundred.

However, it's a good idea on his part. 10+ year old floppies are only going to get worse and worse, and these are apparently "archive backups".

I guess we'll see how many he brings in next time.

Western Digital, again.

2007-04-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

This time, I didn't know it was a Western Digital right away, because it was in a LaCie D2 enclosure. Drive was very slow and unresponsive, transferring data at a rate of 1-2k per second with periodic stalls. The drive itself made some very "interesting" noises as it came on, and took a few minutes to come up. Had a theory it might have been a failing firewire bridge, talked to the customer, since the drive was out of warranty went ahead and opened it up. Inside was indeed, a Western Digital drive, 250gb to be specific.

Unfortunately it continued to be very slow and unresponsive on a firewire dock which led me to believe it was the drive itself. Was able to copy 20gb or so in multiple attempts, however the drive would stall out and spin down after extended reads, especially on certain parts of the drive. The drive itself was mostly full, so this wasn't a very good amount. Put a fan on it to keep it cool since it seemed to get fairly warm. However, it has since seemed to fully fail. It made an odd noise and errored out on a copy, and now it only makes a series of clattering noises at spin up, never recognized by the computer. Going to try a few other tactics, after giving it a day or two to "rest".
--

Western Digital "WD Caviar" WD2500 250gb 3.5" ATA, 01 JUN 2004 (WD2500JB-00FUA0)

When what you see is...

2007-04-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

Had a priority, ASAP-type data recovery to do. One of a business customer's iMacs, that they used for something semi-important, had what seemed to be a hard drive failure. It was actually a relatively easy fix, it was just suffering from some fragmentation and very, very corrupted directories. I had a bit of a problem at first simply because I was trying to recover everything and it seemed like the Users folder was going to be unrecoverable. Every time I tried I ended up with an empty folder. After trying several different tactics I chalked it up to just being too late for that portion of the drive. Well, surprise surprise, the answer was actually much simpler; they were only using MacOS 9. OS X was installed, so I assumed it was running it, but it had never been booted into even once so there were no user-specific files created.

Sometimes the complicated thing isn't very much so.

AppleTV "fun"

2007-04-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

Wow, the AppleTV has only been out a short while but people have already disassembled it, figured out the specs of all the (unknown) parts in it, figured out ways to upgrade the hard drive, how to make it run a full version of MacOS X, and even how to take the special AppleTV apps (or "frappliances" as Apple seems to have named them) off of it and run them on a regular Intel mac.

Some good info at http://www.appletvhacks.net/

If it wasn't a brand-new $300-ish device, I'd totally love to be doing that myself.
I guess i have to content myself with doing similar-style things (albeit with a lot less overall usefulness) with old hardware that has very little current market value.

FWIW, it's a 1GHz low-power Intel processor, with 256MB of RAM, a 64mb NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 and an 40gb HD.
The RAM's soldered down, so no easy upgrade there, but people are already putting in 80gb and 120gb hard drives as replacements. That seems to be the only easy hardware replacement/upgrade, and people are already figuring out how to make software plugins for it.

People, sometimes...

2007-03-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

I don't normally write about all the iPods I work on, just because the repairs are usually really simple and mundane. Same holds true for recovering data from them (usually music). However, today's is worth noting solely because of this conversation between the customer and I.

Him: I accidentally deleted all of my photos from my iPod, I thought I copied them, but I didn't, and then I deleted them using iTunes and now they're gone and please, if you can bring them back it will be a miracle.
Me: Yeah, should be possible. How long ago did you delete them?
Him: A few weeks ago.
Me: ...
Me: Uh. Have you used the iPod since then?
Him: Yeah, of course.
Me: No, I mean. Have you plugged it into any computers and put stuff on it? Have you synched it?
Him: Well, I've plugged it into this computer a few times and I think it put some new stuff on it.
Me: How many times have you plugged it into any computer, period?
Him: Uhhhh...Four? Five? I did notice that there were some new pictures on there that my wife must have added.
Me: ...Well, let's hope for a miracle then.

If the pictures were so important, why did he keep putting stuff on it and using it? I guess people just don't understand how things work when they delete "important" stuff by accident and want it back. Well, here's hoping, for his sake...
--

When it rains...?

2007-03-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

Had a computer I did a data recovery for on Saturday, was not incredibly noteworthy as I was able to do the majority of the backup without even pulling the drive out, just had the computer booted in target disk mode. However, there were a few files that I had skipped that it turned out I needed after all. Well, they weren't exactly a necessity, but a bunch of them were root-level directories like private, bin, etc. (Hah! Well, it applies as both et cetera, and the directory! Unix geekery ahoy.) Without these we were going to need to recreate all 4 of her accounts on the computer and seeing as how she only provided one password and was coming in an hour or so, I figured...hey, let's just give it another shot.

Wow. The drive emitted what could best be described as a hideous shrieking when I plugged it in. Followed by some clattering, and some more shrieking. After a few moments though, it calmed down and mounted. Noisily. Had to use terminal to copy the directories since they were invisible and I did not want to mess with trying to change the invisible bit on a failing drive. (Ok, fine. Yes, I did try once and the application crashed immediately and relaunched the Finder, ok?)
cp -R, the usual.

Everything copied, barring a few of the files that had system permissions that would not allow copying (even despite sudo. lame.). Put them onto the new drive, now going to see if it can be coaxed into an archive/install...and as a further bonus, now that the drive is out, I can make note of it as well...had everything proceeded fine from saturday's work, would not have needed to bother. Plus, no point in disassembling a 12" PowerBook, which is mildly inconvenient anyway, just to look at the drive label. So bonus! Here we go.

As an aside, this drive actually did *not* like being moved at all while in use. It would actually make a low squeal and vibrate in your hand whenever you touched it...an interesting counterpart to most of the "Please, stand me upright in order to work" Toshiba drives...this one actually sounded even more horrendous when placed at a 90° angle to the desk or anything other than completely flat and still.

--
Toshiba MK6025GAS / HDD2189 "PLUTA" 60gb 2.5" ATA (655-1112 Apple OEM)

Back to normal...

2007-03-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

Well, yet another positionally-challenged laptop drive. Machine came in for a drive upgrade since it was running slow, but had stopped working sometime recently and was just hanging at boot. When plugged in, it made a faint rattling noise with an occasional clink, and would hang the computer when trying to access it, generating i/o errors as well. Stood it up on its end and it quieted down almost immediately. Programs then began to cooperate as well, and started scanning it for recovery. Still the occasional tick, but after the initial (very slow) scan of directories everything seems to be proceeding well...the drive even eventually mounted itself on the desktop unbidden, in the middle of the recovery. Previously, it wouldn't even identify itself with a volume name to Disk Utility, showing up only as disk4.

On the other hand, I picked the wrong drive as a scratch volume for the recovery so I have had to sit here and babysit it, dismissing the low disk space/out of virtual memory warnings that pop up periodically when it reserves a large portion of scratch all at once. I was concerned it might actually crash or freeze at some point, but has been semi-well-behaved otherwise. Now to see if what is has recovered is, you know...good.

--
Toshiba MK4025GAS / HDD2190 "PLUTA" 40gb 2.5 ATA (655-1157A Apple OEM)

And...another Seagate?

2007-03-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

I've always thought of Seagate, at least as of lately, as being the more reliable of drives. However, now I'm having a couple of them cropping up. Still does not change my opinions of Western Digital (followed by Maxtor), though.

I can't help but wonder, though, if the computer itself is having a seperate problem as well. The drive had been having really sluggish performance for a month or two according to the customer, and when it got here, most of the apps would lock up when trying to access the drive, and the few that would access it would report errors and/or unfixable problems. Didn't think to check SMART though, and now it's in a firewire enclosure. Either way, when I got the drive out and hooked it up externally, it read somewhat normally. A little bit sluggish, but I was able to copy everything from the drive without any problems (However Disk Utility was unable to image the drive and did report an error very quickly).

So just out of curiosity, I ran some tests on it here, and it was in ok shape. Two bad blocks as of 50% of the drive scanned, and only a few semi-minor directory problems. So I'm wondering if the computer itself may have some other issue as well. Now of course, the drive could have a whole slew of bad blocks or errors developed in the last part of the drive and it is like 95% full. So, I don't know, I didn't feel like running a full battery of tests when we already determined the drive was unreliable enough to justify replacing it, but I wonder if we're going to put the drive back in and find out, that say, the logic board, RAM or something else is failing. Hopefully not. the drive just made some odd noises a moment ago, so maybe not.
--
Well, looks like it really was just the drive. There were a few parts I had skipped because they were either giving errors or seemed unnecessary, like the root Library and System, and it seems that must have been where the majority of drive problems actually were, Put the new drive with all the copied data into the computer and it worked fine. Had to go back to the old drive for a few bits, which actually took longer than all of the preceding work because of said drive problems.
--
Seagate ST360015A / 100260701 "Barracuda ATA V" 60gb 3.5" ATA (655-1126 Apple OEM) Datecode 0333

Guess I'm not the only one...

2007-03-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

Walked into the back to get some blank CDs and chatted with a coworker for a minute, he had replaced a customer's hard drive and was copying the contents of the old drive to the new drive. Drive was being sluggish but semi-cooperative, although it gave an i/o error on one of the first tries. Funny part was that he had the drive standing on its side.
I said, hey...you do that too? Or did you get that from me?
And he replied, no, you just have to do that sometimes with these laptop drives...they start going, standing them up seems to help.

So yeah, guess I must not be the only person who "discovered" that. Although, it's almost strange enough to make me wonder if it's psychological, but at the same time, it seems to almost have proven itself by the fact that...doing so has enabled uncooperative drives to become more cooperative.

Either way, if the drive gives him any more problems (it is about 1/3 of the way through a copy after a few hours) I am sure it will head my way.

--
Fujitsu MHT2080AT 80gb 2.5 ATA (655-1136 Apple OEM) Datecode 2003-09

Another Seagate?

2007-03-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Got another drive...seems like as soon as I started to get sick, everything piled up again.
Was out for most of the day on Friday, so I dragged myself in on Saturday, normally my day off, to see what I could get going really quick and possibly let run over the weekend. This drive was a good candidate, will eventually be recognized by the computer after about 10 minutes of seeking and whirring, but the majority of the files cannot be copied due to i/o errors.
Set it on dd, tied up a few other loose ends, and went home.

Got a call first thing this morning from work asking about the status of the recovery, told them where it was and what was going on, it seemed like no one knew what I was talking about so told them I would follow up when I got in in about 15 minutes.

Well, when I got in, interesting. The drive was nowhere to be found. I had hooked it up to the MacPro since the G4 was tied up with another data backup. Had a heatsink and fan on it since it was going to be running sustained all weekend, figured, keep it as cool as possible. Now there was a MacPro sitting at the desktop. Fan running, but no hard drive anywhere to be found. Eventually found it unplugged and put off to the side. Went around asking if anyone knew what was going on.
Eventually the answer turned up. The one person who I hadn't told what I was doing, mainly because he wasn't there at the time, had come upon the computer, decided that it was crashed "because there was all this text on the screen" (i.e. it had a terminal window open) and restarted it...and then, I suppose decided to unplug the drive as well. Blamed not knowing on me for not "putting a note or something on the screen", even though he could have definitely asked at least one person if not more who were in the store at the time he did it.
Then again, it's not so big of a deal, after 2-3 days of running it was only at 18gb of 80 so it probably wasn't going to complete in any sort of timely manner.
--
New tactic today, trying to copy single files and folders manually, either via finder copy or terminal (cp). Have gotten a reasonable amount so far, there are a few important folders the customer needs for their business that I am trying to get, and I'm having to get them a few megabytes at a time. The drive goes into some sort of unstoppable seek mode when it hits one of the bad spots, going "zip zip zip zip click" eternally, so I've had to stop and start many times. Unfortunately, it seems like the more I've been using it, the shorter the interval of usable time I get before it starts doing that seems to become. I'm taking a short break hoping to let the drive "rest" and perhaps cool down, as with the last few attempts it would go immediately into that state upon mounting and not allow any access at all.
--
Well, ended up having to use cp to copy files in small groups, mainly using wildcards and the like ('cp A*' to copy all the files starting with A, etc). The drive started doing this "interesting" thing where it would spin down after a while, mid-copy, and just sit there silent while terminal gave every indication that it still intended to copy the files. I discovered, after it did this a few times, that leaving it unattended would leave it stuck eternally, but if I quickly unplugged and replugged the cable to the drivedock, it would actually spin up and go right back to what it was doing before it spun down. A moment too long, though, and the drive would unmount and the whole operation would fail. So, I ended up having to babysit the drive more than I intended since it kept stalling out. There are still a fair amount of files I have been unable to copy, and now I'm trying a third tactic...the customer intends to get his computer back tomorrow, since it's a key server for his business, but it's also important to recover all of his files since he had not had any backup system in place. He also let me know some of his most important files, and those are the ones giving me the most trouble, of course.
Got pretty much everything I can except for one or two files that are giving me major problems, Trying something different, leaving it running overnight, I guess I'll see what it has gotten me in the morning...hope something comes of it.
--
Looks like running overnight pushed it over the edge as I feared, when I came in this morning it was dead silent and the computer had a disk error on the screen. Unplugging it and re-plugging it yielded only a faint scraping whir, with no signs of activity. Have left it plugged in for a bit, and it's just now starting to make a few signs of maybe-near-life, a sort of tick and what sounds like a half-hearted attempt to seek/read/whatever. But it eventually goes silent again. I suppose it has indeed given up the ghost.
In the meantime, I took the partial image that had been made over the weekend and restored it to another drive. It restored successfully, and for a moment it seemed like it would truly be worthwhile as the drive promptly mounted and was filled with all the appropriate files. However, on closer notice all of the files, while having the proper size, were filled with nothing but 00s, if they would even open. I'm sure this was due to a mixture of the failing drive *and* being such an incomplete image, but it was worth trying. There were scattered handfuls of usable files, but of course, those were all the least useful.

--
Seagate ST9808210A "Momentus 4200.2" 80gb 2.5" ATA (655-1226A Apple OEM) Date 06047
(Extra Info? CM: 2Z694-5098 TSD: 5.2.0 PORT: 3-3-3)

A change of pace, I suppose.

2007-03-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not really a change of pace, but at least it is a drive which is not a Toshiba, Maxtor or Western Digital.

It is a Seagate.

It is even doing something new. Well, compared to everything else for the past month.
When powered up, it makes a series of ticking noises, like...hmm, like it's trying to spin up and seek but stopping in the middle before it can get far enough. If you power it on and off a few times it will successfully spin up, but will report many read errors when trying to access to drive (needless to say it doesn't mount) and after a certain point the drive will just go silent and disappear from the computer, at which point you can power if off and it will go back to the first series of symptoms when you try to power it back on. Controller board, probably, but I don't think I have anything I can swap this one with...I have other 80gb Seagates but they are all either older or newer. I'll have to look into it when I have more time, tomorrow perhaps...it's already the end of the day. Hopefully, if anything, I can keep it alive long enough to copy things off of it. Hopefully.
--

Seagate ST380021A / 100165024 "Barracuda ATA IV" 80gb 3.5" ATA (655-0997 Apple OEM)

Another Toshiba...

2007-03-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

Yet another "got slow and stopped working all of a sudden" drive in a notebook.
Was able to copy the data off except for about 600mb worth of files that reported something like "the file cannot be accessed because it can no longer be found". They also reported a similar error when clicked or accessed in any way...and then they would simply vanish from the screen (until the drive was unmounted and remounted when they would get another chance to do the same thing again).

Drive had a ton of unfixable errors. Disk Utility wouldn't even attempt to fix it, immediately stopped with an error. The other programs would find errors, but in the situation I didn't really want to try and fix them since some of them were hardware-related. Drive made a really interesting series of noises the whole time as well, you know...that whole "drive laboring to run" type noises. Setting it up on its end made the noise lessen greatly and *may* have alleviated part of the problems, of course, the vanishing files still continued to vanish...and nothing I could do seemed to make the files resurrectable. Fortunately, the ones that were doing it were mostly (probably) replaceable files, MP3s, downloaded installers, that sort of thing.

Toshiba MK6025GAS / HDD2189 "PLUTA" 60gb 2.5" ATA (655-1112A Apple OEM)

The Norton and the Tiger

2007-03-14T12:12:00.000-07:00

Well, this one promises to be "interesting".
The note on it indicates that the customer ran Norton Utilities on it and then defragmented/optimized it.
The computer was running OS X 10.4. This is a big no-no.

There's no real specific official reason, as far as I know, other than Apple having changed some internal things to do with the filesystem* and OS that not only break Norton but make it semi-destructive. In a good situation, it will simply not see your drive, or report an unfixable error very early in the process and quit. However, in some cases it will work, attempt to repair the volume, and then trash it in the process. This appears to be one of those cases.

Looking at the notes, it appears that the drive is reported as unreadable but the OS, and most utilities cannot see or fix it, however it was able to be made to appear briefly once through some combination of utilities. As soon as I'm done with my current project, I'll look at this one. Sure would be nice if it is easy and doesn't involve me having to traipse through the data structure of the disk in order to make it readable like I did that one time. Reconstructing disk information is boring and tedious.

*I think that one of the options that broke things was the addition of case-sensitive volumes to bring it on par with other OSes, but that shouldn't necessarily apply unless said volume was formatted in that fashion...I think.
--
Well, it wouldn't mount *or* repair in any permanent fashion, but I was able to get it temporarily mounted with a combination of techniques (too damaged to repair). The files all seemed to copy fine off of the drive, no telling if anything was lost but the 20gb or so all looks perfectly fine. Now, to reformat and copy them back.
--
Done. Copied all of the files off of the drive, formatted it, copied them back, and reinstalled 10.4 since the OS wasn't able to be preserved in this fashion.

Looking back...

2007-03-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I think of something, or I find some old scribbled notes on a piece of paper that makes me remember something I did that I now do not remember at all. I kind of wish I'd been better at making notes of things I have done so that I could do them over again if I ever needed to, rather than just some loose pages that just give me a vague recollection.

Granted, that knowledge is all totally useless now, but I feel like...I don't know, maybe not completely. Maybe there's some way it would be useful, or to someone. I can't help feeling like I want to try and remember it, though. However, I think it may be totally lost after 10+ years.

Let's see, as I've been going through some old papers and throwing them away from some boxes of stuff accumulated over several moves and many years, I've found a lot of those notes. FInding notes I made on the following things:

--A bunch of scribbled notes on various Apple installer scripts (1990s System 7-era stuff) and how I patched the different checks to force them to install...using ResEdit's hex editor. Yeah, I had this...thing, for "collecting" Apple software back in the day. Dorky, yes yes. This let me install various components that it would normally not, either because my computer didn't meet the requirements or because it did some sort of pre-check for software. This also enabled a lot of "upgrade" installers to actually install the full application, since many of them didn't update the app, just checked to make sure it was there before installing.

--Some notes I made when figuring out how to convert a set of old Apple IIe 320k 5.25" GEOS installer disks into one 1.44mb 3.5" disk. I think I made it bypass some kind of copy-protection as well, but I don't remember. This also involved a very intricate dance involving an LC with a IIe card, an Apple HD 20SC external, and an Apple IIgs, as well as the required floppy drives. There was a trip into a hex editor for this as well, I believe to bypass the registration code.

--Instructions on how to patch out code in Apple's Software Dispatch CD. This was a little short-lived sales type thing Apple did in the early 90s where they gave you a CD with tons of software on it, and a little application that would install trial versions, run demos, and just generally tell you about the software. Sort of like Adobe's Type-on-Call except for applications, you would call in and buy the software over the phone with a credit card, they would give you an unlock code and the software would then just...show up, on your desktop on a special volume. I was trying to figure out how to unlock the software, not because I wanted all the OMGpiratedsoftwarez but because there was one piece of software that my stepfather had gotten and he lost the code (I think, it's been a long time) and one day they just closed down the lines for SW Dispatch. It was ok as long as you had the code, and/or never moved or deleted the extension, but something happened where the extension got lost or damaged or something, a couple years after the fact, and well, there you are. I don't think I actually successfully unlocked the CD, though. I think I got as far as making it accept any code but it wouldn't properly access the hidden volume. I guess it may have been encrypted in some fashion by the software, I'm not sure. Either way, that was another hex adventure in ResEdit. I used to know how to write so much code in hex...and now I can only remember two things, and one I'm not even sure of. NOP which was 4E71, and BRA, which...hmm, I think was 60xx. I'm not even sure about that anymore.

Well. I don't think any of that knowledge is important at all anymore, actually. All of the software it involves is incredibly old, and the knowledge can't really be applied forward. Apple has changed virtually everything that it applied to, installers, code structure (this was 68k days which are long, long gone), even the underlying OS...a lot, in the past 10 years. Eh, ah well.

FileVault, you're a liability sometimes.

2007-03-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

Tonight a frantic woman came in. She's leaving in a day for a long trip (Thailand, I think she said, and for a few months), and had just a few hours tonight free before having to do a bunch of stuff before she leaves, or something along those lines...I wasn't really paying attention to that part.

Well she decided that since she was leaving on a long trip, she needed to backup all of her personal files...and inexplicably, she also decided to turn on FileVault "for better security". To make matters worse, when she was trying to burn CDs she didn't realize that she was occasionally working with the original files. (10.4 has a new "feature" that creates aliases for the files that it copies to the CD at burn time rather than making a blank disc image and copying the files to it and *then* burning it like 10.3 and earlier did, I suppose to save space and whatnot. Needless to say, if you "copy" a folder to a 10.4 CD icon, then double-click the icon from the pre-burn-CD, it actually opens up the original folder on your HD and any changes you make are to that original. Not good for the uninformed.) ...which is exactly what she had done.

In the process of trying to move files around since she kept running out of space on the CDs, she moved and deleted her originals. Here I will point out that FileVault makes recovering trashed files, or even working with certain things, a pain in the butt because your home folder is essentially an encrypted disk image itself. Since there was very little way I would have been able to recover the files as they were, I decided to take a chance and disable filevault and decrypt her home folder once again. It did so, and after a minute or so, logged back in. I don't know if the files she had thrown away were hidden because they were in a temp folder of some sort, or if it is a "feature" of filevault to hide files in the trash but upon logging back in there were a bunch of randomly named-numbered folders in the trash. Upon examining the folders it was obvious that they contained various parts of the thrown away folders, for instance I found several parts of the Library and Preference folders...and her Quicken and QuickBooks datafiles.

Well, seems like she lucked out. I figured out how to put it all back into the places it needed to be, and her email, address book, all that, began working normally. Her QuickBooks and Quicken opened fine as well. Then, I backed it up the proper way. All of her files, including Pictures and everything, fit on one CD...I'm not sure what she was trying to back up that filled whole CDs, perhaps she was trying to get everything on the hard drive, like the applications and stuff.

--
Aw, she was so happy when she came back that she hugged me. It's always nice when people are so... appreciative of the effort and what you've done for them. She's probably going to be more careful now, of course.

0 for 0.

2007-03-09T07:23:00.000-08:00

Man, this is now...uh, 3 drives in a row that have all had some sort of internal failure I can't do anything about.
This one is a Maxtor, I pulled it from it's (Maxtor 5000DV) enclosure in hopes I could do something with it, but it makes a few protesting noises and that's it. It spins but fails to read and sounds sort of...rough. Plus, it makes a suspicious squeak-clunk when it first tries to spin up. (link)

I tried something daring. I swapped the board with the nearly identical board from a same generation Maxtor SATA drive. Same specs. Eh, still the same thing. But I know, perhaps in the future, that may work for other situations...maybe.
--
::sigh::
Me: "You've probably had a head crash, or something like it. Did you have anything really crucial on here? Drive Savers might be an option."
Them: "It's important business files"
Me: "Ok, here's their number, but I'll warn you now, they can be expensive, a common range is $800-2800 with it being more towards the high end, but with their facilities they are usually able to get things off of drives no one else can"
Them: "What! My data's worth that much!"
Me: "Ok, it isn't for a lot of people"
Them: "What can Maxtor do for me?"
Me: "Well, since it's out of warranty, not much. I'm sure they will replace the drive, but it will most likely be for the cost of a new drive."
Them: "Will they get my files for me?"
Me: "No, most likely they'll refer you to a company like DriveSavers"
Them: "Can they fix my drive?"
Me: "No, if anything they will offer to replace it for the cost of a new one"
Them: "I don't give a damn about the drive, I just want my data!"
Me: "..."
Me: "Well, then you need a company like DriveSavers."

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 "CALYPSO III" 120gb ATA133, 24-Oct-2002

Chill out...

2007-03-08T12:43:00.000-08:00

This drive sounds like a galloping horse. Well, a tiny, glassy, galloping horse...but still. Tried a different controller board because for once I actually had a very similar type of drive nearby, but no change. Drive reports itself as either a 9gb or 2tb drive to the computer (it's a 40gb drive). Any attempt to read the drive reports instant read errors for any block. (Surface scan completes very quickly with 100% bad blocks).

Funny thing is more the customer. He's been fixated on the idea of cold being a magical solution from the very beginning. Kept making suggestions about keeping it cold to try and make it work, to me, and earlier when he brought the machine in.. We actually had a conversation something like this.

Me: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a mechanical problem, maybe the head, based on what it sounds like and the fact that it's not even attempting to read the drive with a different controller. ::starts to talk about drivesavers::
Him: Have you tried making it really cold?
Me: Well, I didn't notice an overheating problem, those are more likely to start and then immediately fail than failing from the beginning. I felt most of the chips too and they weren't even unusually warm.
Him: Still. I hear that making drives cold can get the data off of them.
Me: Well, I can put a fan on it.
Him: Can you supercool it? I know that making metal really cold can change it's, you know... properties.
Me: Supercool? Uh. ::envisions immersing drive in a vat of liquid nitrogen:: No, we don't really have the facilities to super-cool anything.
Him: Oh, well, you know, just try making it cold, ok?
Me: Will do.

I put the drive into two bags, a paper and then a plastic, and put it in the freezer until it was good and cold. No change.

Well, I'm gonna try one more thing and then probably break him the bad news that it's something I can't do anything about.

Maxtor 40.9gb 54098U8 "DRACO II" (655-0839 Apple OEM) 10-Aug-2000

--Took the drive apart. He didn't want to do DriveSavers since it was too expensive. Said I could have the drive. Definitely a head crash, the head was kinda angled and there was a groove dug into the very center of the drive.

Airport misfortunes...

2007-03-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

A customer accidentally left her laptop at airport security, I assume during the hustle and bustle of trying to catch a plane. Took them a few weeks to get it back to her as well...and now it very mysteriously doesn't work. Or rather, the hard drive is failing. I assume one of the following occurred:
A) It was dropped or very roughly handled.
B) It was exposed to excessive heat or magnetism.
C) All of the above.

[Well, at least she got it back. Since they seem to usually have that whole "we have no responsibility for personal belongings..." type policy at airports.]

She gets it back, boots it up, and the very first time it actually did start up to the desktop before it immediately crashed and then got stuck booting to the command-line with login: disk0s3: I/O error. forever more.

Right now I'm getting what I can from of it. It is too damaged to image but it does mount after a little coaxing and after a very long wait, I'm using cp to copy what I can first (from her Users folder) and fortunately it's only errored on 8 or so files of possible importance, Documents and the like, the majority of damaged files that haven't copied have been in her iTunes Music folder and the Library folder. After this is done, which may take a while...it's been copying several gigabytes for the past 6 hours...I'll try a few other approaches to get the rest, assuming that what has copied so far is valid. (Maybe give dd a shot for a single-file-at-a-time copy)
Here's hoping. It's made some pretty atrocious noises a few times, but it has calmed down after a little while.
--
Well, perhaps I spoke too soon. I ended up being out for a day but it had run all night, when I had left it the night before it had thrown back a few errors copying files from the iPhoto library, when I came back it was now several pages. Had to move on to something else because of the setback from missing a day, will come back to it; at least I have made some progress so far, and can just focus on a few documents and a chunk of photos.
--
Coming back to this nearly a week later...had to put it aside for other stuff.
Was able to use dd to single-file copy several of the files, about...50% of the files came ok through that way, the rest were too damaged. I'm trying a different tactic with the iPhoto Library, the Music is all mp3, doesn't look like anything purchased so I'm skipping over that part for time's sake. So far it's been running all day today, I had to stop and restart it once when it got stuck on a particular file. We'll see how this turns out, hopefully it will finish before the end of the day...3 hours left or so. Otherwise, it should be done by tomorrow, unless it gets stuck again. Bleh. Either way there are two more drives waiting...anytime something takes me a few days, it kind of starts a logjam. It also doesn't help that I had to work on a half-dozen iPods as well.

Toshiba MK3025GAS / HDD2196 "PLUTA" 30gb 2.5" ATA (655-1187B Apple OEM)

Western Digital...

2007-03-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

Well, here's all the drive info I've been able to scrounge up. If I find anything else I suppose I'll just add it here, but for the older stuff where I wasn't keeping track of it...ah well. I suppose that is lost now.

Model Capacity Type Datecode
WD740 74.3gb SATA 25-Sep-04
WD800 80.0gb ATA 1-Feb-04
WD800 80.0gb ATA 13-Jan-04
WD1600 160.0gb ATA 27-Apr-04
WD2500 250.0gb ATA 16-Dec-03

Drive positioning

2007-03-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

It's sort of interesting, every once in a while I get a drive that suddenly becomes much more cooperative just by rearranging it. Got a hard drive from a PowerBook, a 60gb Toshiba (MK6025GAS), and it was being totally flaky. I could hear it churning away, occasionally doing the dreaded "zip zip zip didididi zip zip zip didididi" sound of a drive that's stuck reading and rereading due to disk errors. Occasionally it would go silent but was still totally inaccessible.

Stood it on it's end so that the ATA connector was pointing straight up in the air, well, it was at a very slight angle because I leaned it against the G4. Plugged it in, it churned a bit, and then popped up on the desktop and I was able to copy everything off of it, although it did have a few very laggy moments. Set it back down and back came the problem.

You know...actually, I think this type of situation and "workaround" has come up before with this type of drive and the computer it went in. Yeah, I think one or two of the postings in here involved those too.

So we have:
Western Digital drives from a few years ago that suicide abruptly.
Toshiba notebook SATA drives from last year that suddenly conk out after a few months.
and now Toshiba notebook ATA drives from a couple years ago that suddenly don't want to read properly unless they are at a certain angle.

Hmm. Picky, picky drives.

Either way, they caught it in time, I got all their stuff and put it onto their external drive so happy day, I suppose.

MacBook Drive Woes

2007-03-02T08:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I think it's safe to say that there is indeed an issue with a handful of certain drives in the MacBook. We've gotten in a fair amount of MacBooks with the same "and then the drive just suddenly died one day" problem, and it's always the Toshiba models, and it's always replaced by Apple with a Seagate instead. Perhaps there was just a bad run of Toshiba's 2.5" SATA drives, or something like that. Not really sure, but this will be the third I've worked on semi-recently and I know of at least 4 more in the recent past.

Today's got stuck in an endless loop when booted in single-user/command-line mode. It would get stuck at the Apple logo otherwise...and none of the usual apps would see or work with the drive either.

disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED)
(repeated intermittently the entire time)
kextd[28]:kextd_watch_volumes: couldn't set up diskarb sessions
kextd[28]:diskarb isn't ready yet, we'll try again soon
(for few dozen lines)
memberd[39]:couldn't find root user. sleeping and trying again.
(this would run for a page or so with occasional other errors until I finally just shut the machine off)

Opening...

2007-02-28T10:21:00.000-08:00

Well...I've pondered, discussed, and procrastinated...

I've wanted a place to put my random technical geek-babblings about data recovery and some assorted things. Partly because I wonder if anyone out there is interested, partly because I feel like putting it somewhere in writing.

Maybe in case I forget something and want to come back and consult it for future reference, or else because I want other people to see it. Sometimes I remember everything, sometimes I feel like I'm always forgetting something. I've never really thought about it as a special skill, but more and more people I know are treating it as such. Perhaps this will share the knowledge, or bring me fame and fortune. Well, some kind of money in general. I doubt "fame and fortune" is ever applied to technical jobs....and either way, I'm doing the whole "I'm leaving an imprint of myself on the web, at least as long as this particular site is around, via this blog" thing that is going on these days. I have had a livejournal for years but that's so much more...well, it's always been for me to talk about goofy things with my friends that also have livejournals. This one, while it may not be...professional, per se...it will hopefully seem more intelligible, since it's going to focus on technically-oriented things.

Who knows though...perhaps no one will ever read this. I suppose that's the peril of making a blog. However, I don't especially worry about that.

Right now, I work at a local company who sells and repairs Apple computers. The local Apple-owned retail store at the mall looms over us with it's top-dollar showroom as I hear it does to all independant stores.

On the other hand, I get to do a lot of stuff repair-wise, that the Apple Store does not. Repairs on iPods, fixing computers that are considered obsolete (I have a special place in my heart for old computers, I grew up with them...but then again, from what I've seen and heard, anything older than 5 years is "too old", whereas I consider stuff from the 80s to be "old")...and various assorted things, one of which is recovering data from failed hard drives, and various situations like that.

I currently have a Power Mac G4 (1.25 MDD) running OS 10.3 for my main workstation with various adaptors and contraptions for accessing different types of drives and storage...of course, there's always something new I'd love to have. That is just the way it is, no? It got named "Recoverator" on the network when it was first set up, which then became its (and sometimes, mine...bleh.) nickname. Hence the name of this blog as well...for lack of any better idea, after a month of occasional thinking.
In the back, I have my alternate workstation for all the older stuff, various types of SCSI, Zip, Jaz, Bernoulli, SyQuest, floppies. That is a Beige G3 Minitower running OS 8.5. It's been nicknamed "Rosetta" by some of the other techs due to it's...uhm, well, backwards compatibility. I'm ok with that nickname, even if it's cheesy.
In between is a room called the Macseum. I used to call it the Beigeatorium, but no one liked that nickname. It's a room full of all sorts of old Macs (and other Apple stuff) that's been a pet project of mine for a few years now, and really, I've wanted to do something like that since way back in the day because I'm a dork like that. It's mostly for show, but I've gotten most of the things in there to function as well, and sometimes I must resort to an especially old machine in there for something. Usually involving pre-System 7 or a very, very old floppy.

--

And now, from this point on, I'm going to make a tremendous series of backdated entries. I've been keeping track of a lot of things I've been doing in the past few months, with the idea that I was going to be making a blog of it. The rest, I will just try and recall from memory. Everything from this point forward, of course, I'll try and do as they go.

Initially I was keeping track of everything but then I realized how boring "Someone brought in a drive that was failing and I recovered some data from it" was, even for me...So now I'm just logging things that fall into a few categories:
1) Interesting or unique in some way.
2) Something I want to try and keep track of.
3) Something that involved an complicated or involved solution.
Of course, anything's fair game, but there is not much point of a repetitive, monotonous blog after all.

The Frankendrive

2007-02-25T14:01:00.001-08:00

Guy brings in a "LaCie Drive". Except said drive is probably the most generic-looking of cheap generic enclosures yet. It was only after talking to him that it turns out a few years ago his LaCie external drive failed and he put the drive into this enclosure. Which kind of never worked right since day one, having to be turned on and off and unplugged and replugged to get working. whee, quality. Based on what he is describing, though, it sounds like an enclosure/bridge failure, I hope...he's pretty sure of it. Soon as the other two things are done, I'll pop it open and see.
--
Well, actually, it appears the drive has died. Got it out of the enclosure and hooked it up, it's dead to the world; I can't even hear it try to spin up. Wait for it, wait for it...Yep! Western Digital from 2004!
Have one or two things to try, but at the moment I'll pass it up for the next since I had a bit of a logjam for the past few days waiting for a drive to finish and free up the workstation.
--
Definitely a controller failure. Drive is completely quiet. Looked around for a little bit for another 160gb same-era WD drive that had a working board and couldn't find one. Found very near date-code 80gb and 250gb ones, however.
With nothing to lose, going to give the 250gb board an experimental shot since the boards look identical and the power specs and everything is exaclty the same as well (whereas the 80gb version is fairly different) and hope that there isn't anything too different in terms of internal workings between the two, nothing would make a drive unhappier than trying to communicate with a platter or head that didn't exist.

WD1600 next to WD2500
--
Hooked up the frankendrive to power and it spun up quite readily. Powered down and tried again with the IDE cable hooked up and gave it another shot and it mounted on the desktop...it still has the LaCie name and icon too, as well. Hah. Took a deep breath and started copying all the data, it is proceeding normally, here's hoping it's all valid in the end and isn't mangled because of off block-sizes or something oddball like that.
--
Well, looks like it worked. Copied everything that was on there, about 60gb, and it all looks to be valid and usable. Everything seemed correct for the drive as well, despite it having the controller board from a larger-capacity drive, perhaps they're slightly more flexible than I thought, or perhaps I just lucked out. I know that previously with SCSI drives, sometimes two boards of the exact same model drive wouldn't work properly or at all. Maybe they stored more information on the onboard controller itself, in hindsight, I suppose that may very well be the case.

Either way, I copied it all over to a new, actual LaCie drive, and all was well in the world. So to speak.

He had us throw away the old enclosure for him.

Not only is it bad luck, it's a lot of it.

2007-02-22T13:59:00.000-08:00

Same guy from the two prior times dropped off *another *2 hard drives to try and get his music off of them as well. He seems to have very bad luck with hard drives. (link) (link)
This time, he provided a list of things to try and get, will take a look at them shortly.
--
Well. Unlike the last one, these were a snap. Showed up on the computer with no problems, copied just fine. Oddly, he had made notes of specific artists we wanted me to look for and I was only able to find one folder filled with several gigabytes worth of music, but none of the artists that he was asking about. Copied a few other things for good measure, although left the majority of his videos...most of them appeared to be recordings of football games and dozens of gigabytes apiece. Not enough room on my scratch drive at the moment, he's got a drive to bring by later, I'll ask him then.

When computers move on their own

2007-02-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

"Came home and found machine upside-down on the floor". Machines that move themselves are always so mysterious.

However, in this case it sounds like it was a roommate that doesn't want to take responsibility. Hopefully it's not a totally crashed drive...I'll know when I get a chance to look at it next.
--
Hard drive was actually in fine shape, it was just the logic board that was bad and it needed to be backed up before it was sent off to Apple. Just put it in Target Disk mode and copied everything, couldn't image due to some directory damage but really, the Home folder is what was important and copying that was a breeze.

Chance to use a new adaptor!

2007-02-19T13:56:00.000-08:00

Found a 100gb (MacBook, SATA) drive on my desk with a note about doing data recovery on it. Was partitioned into 3 volumes, which was odd. The first was a very small (200mb) ISO9660 partition. This is strange because ISO9660 is a format normally associated with CDs. The next two were a MacOS HFS+ partition and a Windows NTFS partition. Upon investigation, turns out the 200mb partition was actually part of Boot Camp. I'm going to look into that more, it's intriguing. I imagine it's some sort of bootloader, I suppose. Of course, the drive itself seems to be failing. Lots and lots of i/o errors and quite noisy. Called the guy to see what he wanted, if he expected data to be recovered from both partitions since that would involve a lot more time and money than the original tech gave him an estimate for. Went back and forth a little bit before he decided that he really didn't care about the data on the NTFS volume since it was mostly apps he had installed. Right now I have dd copying the HFS partition. It's taken a day or so with pages of errors, but hopefully it gets something worthwhile.
--
dd ran for days and only yielded about 150mb of data (on a 100gb drive) so decided to scrap that idea. Instead decided to scour the drive for recoverable data for a few days. It's trying to recover now after 2 days of scanning, here's hoping it gets something usable.
--
Well, seems to be in luck so far, although it did make a horrible squealy noise at one point during the recovery. Won't know for sure if the data I'm getting is good but I'm aiming for the 10gb or so User folder first since that will probably have the most irreplaceable items in this situation.
--
Well, recovered his entire home folder and some scattered personal files and they all appear to be ok. His entourage email may be toast though. Ah, well...
Got in his replacement drive from apple; it's under warranty, actually quite new, and they substituted a Seagate for the original Toshiba...Hmmmmmm. Copied everything over to the new drive and sent it on its way.

Toshiba 100gb "ARIES" MK1032GSX / HDD2D30 2.5" SATA (655-1288A Apple OEM)

This guy has bad luck with drives

2007-02-14T13:53:00.000-08:00

After successfully recovering music and pictures from the guy's iPod and other external HD, he brought in another drive, this was a secondary in his tower. Which is a PC running Windows XP. Also, yet another Western Digital from a couple years ago. Whee. Well, it shows up, sort of, but not really. At least it seems in better shape than a lot of other drives.

However, it does show up only as a device with no volumes on it (i.e. WD740@ /dev/disk2 instead of "Disk Name" @ /dev/disk2s1).
However, I know it's NTFS but I'm having issues reading it on my G4. Will give the Mac Pro a shot since it's 10.4 and I'm gonna give MacFUSE a shot since NTFS support is kinda cruddy with the built-in support and sometimes you only see half of the files and such.
--
Downloaded and installed MacFUSE with the NTFS component, had given this a test run before with a friend's computer/drive and it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, fuse scrolls a half-page of errors and fails to mount this drive. Tried dd to just read the drive raw, and it immediately began turbo-scrolling i/o errors for every block. So, perhaps the drive is indeed shot in the exact same manner. Have one or two more ideas, but I'm thinking...this may also be bad, just like the rest.
--
Definitely a drive controller failure of some sort. It cannot read or write to any block on the drive. At best, I can read an image of the drive consisting of nothing but 0's. One of those situations where maybe transplanting another drive's controller board of the exact same type and revision might work, but the chances of finding one are small, I certainly don't have one and it's a semi-odd type (74gb Raptor or something like that)

Western Digital, 03-04 wasn't a good year for you.

2007-02-13T13:51:00.000-08:00

Had been waiting a day or so for this one to come in, someone had called with some questions on their hard drive and was referred to me but then wanted to just "drop by". Apparently the drive had just stopped working one day, it was fine and then the computer would not see it and would ask to initialize it. Hopefully it's just a trashed directory, but since it's a Western Digital from about 2 years ago, it could also be one of "those drives" that randomly dies. Either way, still have a couple things to do before I get to it.
--
Finally able to work on this since I got the cables in for my new multifunction dock, was missing one in the package.
--
Nope. It's a hardware failure, spins up, makes a loud clunking noise and spins itself down after about 5 seconds, and the controller reports the drive as a 4tb drive or something ridiculous like that. Which is a typical type of "the failure"...maybe someday I'll find out what actually causes it.

Bad blocks really like email databases

2007-02-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

Found another drive waiting for me when I got in after a few days off. Customer didn't think there was much of anything wrong, just that it wasn't "reading right". Well, that is pretty true, it's having tons of i/o errors reading the drive...hundreds and hundreds.

It's been running all day and has been stalled periodically, but for the last 7 hours or so it's been stalled on one particular file, which just happens to be the customer's entourage email database file. Unfortunately, I really need to hope for it to work it's way out since if I cancel out I will not be sure where I am in the process and will probably have to blindly start it again in the middle somewhere. What I have been able to see seems to be recovered fine, including most of the apps, which was one of the things the customer really, really wanted. Since it was "just too inconvenient" to have to re-install them. Of course, I'm sure he'll have lost his email...a file this problematic will usually be trashed beyond repair even if some of it is recovered somewhat. Of course, now that the machine is tied up there's all these other things I also need to be doing but eh, I guess I'l just leave this tonight and see if it's worked out in the morning. Hopefully.
--
Well, it was still stalled out on the same file. Stopped the process and tried to figure out if I could pick it up right after that file. Fortunately, I was able to find the spot and started recovering from that point on and it all completed successfully. Even better news was that the damaged file was actually from an older version of Entourage and the newer version copied successfully. Although, having a 2gb email file is just waiting for something bad to happen.

Was able to import his email back in and it seemed to work fine, there's no email for the past few weeks which could very well be when the problem first started to rear its ugly head.

iPod Gone Wrong

2007-01-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

This was a mildly interesting one. Guy came in with an iPod, he had been trying to share some music with a friend and had unplugged the friend's iPod (without telling the system to eject it) and plugged his back in. Somehow, paths got crossed and iTunes overwrote part of his iPod so that it seemed to be his friend's iPod now. Of course, he had no backups of his purchased music since he had just recently changed computers, and his backup hard drive had failed.

However, I was able to recover all of his music, or at least, the majority of it, using file tags, and thankfully, since most of the music had ID tags they could then be processed to be renamed from "Audio File #10.m4a" to the proper names. Took forever, though, since I had to use USB and the workstation I use only has USB 1.1. Guy also brought in his external drive which had been covered up in a pile under his desk and overheated to see if I could get data from that too.

Couldn't do much of anything with it since it had been formatted NTFS however I was also able to scavenge this drive using file tags and get a bunch of files, pictures, movies, music. He's gonna sort through them on his own. (I typically won't "sort through" people's media for them since, well...it's quite often filled with personal stuff or porn and while I don't care either way, they usually do or would). Drive seemed to be damaged anyway, so he ended up bringing in a new drive to put everything on.

Some people have bad luck, it seems.

2007-01-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

Ok, now I'm starting to feel bad for this person. That iBook that I couldn't recover any information off of...
(link)...turns out they had some of it backed up on another family member's PowerBook. Which just came in with a "does not boot" problem, they had tried to reinstall the system and had not had enough free space, brought it in here to have us back up the data and do the install for them, and well...as soon as we started to try backing it up, it ran into all sorts of problems.

Ran a surface scan on it and the drive has developed bad blocks and sure enough, they just happen to be mainly on the section where the same backed up data is...So, it was waiting for me when I got in today. So far, it seems to be progressing ok...The computer locked up each time when trying to do a standard copy (which I later found out one of the other guys here had tried and didn't tell me) so I'm using Terminal. It's been throwing up the occasional i/o error, it's at about 6 files it has had to skip so far, but at least it's progress. Then again, bad blocks or not, this drive is in a lot better shape than the first one.
--
Copy via Terminal (using cp) succeeded. 7 files total skipped due to i/o errors. Will see if there is a way to get just those files, or if they are done for. Also, need to check into the copied folders and make sure nothing broke in an odd way. Copying via cp can strip off part of some files, especially in certain situations.

Well, looks like everything is ok. The Photoshop files that didn't have a .psd extension are now unassigned to an application, although they still open up fine within the program, and all the previews and custom icons were lost on those files. All of this is totally normal, since they got their resource fork stripped off. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be any files that needed their resource fork, and all the previews and icons can be regenerated if desired. Was able to go back and recover 5 more of the files on bad blocks, images which fortunately were not corrupted in any significant way, and leaving two movie files which were too damaged to be saved.

When PC Compatibility is a burden

2007-01-19T13:40:00.000-08:00

Got a request to copy over a customer's data from a Zip disk they were using to their new MacBook Pro. Normal enough, except for an inconvenient problem I often run into with people who are a) moving from an OS9 or earlier machine to OSX and b) have backed up their info to a Zip Disk.

You see, the majority of Zip Disks come (came?) FAT formatted for Windows PCs. They always have a folder called "For Mac OS Users" with an app that will reformat the disk for OS9 or OSX however the majority of people, upon seeing that the disk "works" will simply begin using it. This wouldn't normally be much of a problem as the built-in File Exchange drivers will allow you to access a PC-formatted volume as if it were a mac volume. There are a few minor trade-offs in speed and overall compatibility but the average person will never run into them.

The problem, however, arises when then trying to use this same disk in OSX. You see, the way that the OS makes this volume work as if it were a mac volume, by having custom icons, and being able to store mac-specific "forked" files, i.e., applications, other resource files...is by creating a special version of the desktop file to store mac-specific type/creator info, and by creating a designator to show how the forked files are split up.

This ability, however, differs between OS9 and earlier, and OSX. If a person has a FAT-formatted volume used with OS9, that for instance, a bunch of applications and, let's just say Microsoft Works documents stored on it, and the same disk is then inserted into a machine running OSX...the files are, in essence, broken in the process. Files will either show up with generic Terminal icons as a "Unix Executable Application" (which they are of course, not), or else as a plain generic "Document". If the files are copied over like this, to the OSX machine, applications and resource files will be broken in a way that they are most often permanently unusable. Documents can usually be made to work provided you can figure out what the application they were used for, and manually setting the type/creator using a third-party app.

The only workaround I have ever found is to find a machine with a zip drive which can boot into OS9. Put the disk in this machine and you will see that all the documents are properly associated. All the applications, working. All the icons in place. If you then copy them to the computer and reboot the machine into OSX you will see that this information has now carried over. In this case, this was exactly what I needed to do in order to copy the files properly.

A little knowledge can be worse than none

2007-01-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

Got a call from a guy with an iMac G5 with a failing drive, at least, that's what he believes. His story changes multiple times about what is actually wrong with the computer, but he seems dead-set on the drive "having a short in it". Wants us to try and fix or replace the controller board (on the drive). Explain why that is unfeasible; first because the various drives have subtly different versions of firmware onboard and sometimes two drives of the same capacity will have slightly different geometry information but mainly because the only way to replace the board would be to get another drive of the same type and at that point, why not just replace said drive with the replacement. So anyway, explain to him that all we are going to do is try to recover his data. He keeps returning to the idea of fixing the drive, at one point he suggests that I simply "get the drive working for him" and then he will pick it up. Uh-huh. Yeah, it doesn't quite work like that. Mainly because failing drives might be able to be made to mount, but it can definitely be an intricate process....which cannot usually be made to "stick". sigh. He then says he wants to spend as little as possible and I have to let him know everything in order for him to decide what he wants. I make sure he understands everything, but I feel like this is going to be a pain. I wonder though, if the drive is even bad. Going to look into it once I'm done with the current job.
--
Well, the drive *does* definitely force whatever machine it is in to shut itself off about 15 seconds after coming on. Now, to see if the drive itself is able to give up it's data...it doesn't *sound* like it's in terribly bad shape at a first look.
It won't mount, seems to not report any S.M.A.R.T probs, but I don't wanna muck around with trying to "fix" the probs since the ones disk utility finds are significant. Set dd to clone to drive to another of the same size. dd has thrown back a couple dozen read errors so it's got at least a few bad blocks so far.
--
A full 24 hours later and it's still going. Hopefully after getting back after this weekend, it will be done. Uh, successfully, of course.
--
Well, got in today and the machine was finished with the block-copy. Was able to repair some errors on the (new) drive now that it was a healthy drive with only a dozen or so blocks it had gotten errors on during the copy.

One pass with disk utility off of the Tiger DVD I had been booted off of in order to use dd, a second pass with fsck in single-user mode and the machine is now booting fine. Although, it's still got some glitchy behavior. For instance the customer has some sort of startup utility that is trying to set a value in PRAM, no idea why, but it generated an error something like "Cannot set PRAM. This error is normal on some machines, booting into OS9 will fix the problem" Interesting, considering this machine cannot boot into OS9. Hopefully he's not running some archaic pice of crapware. Either way, I'm just here to troubleshoot the drive and get his data since he didn't even drop the computer off, so I think it's time to call it done on this one.

I was briefly worried he was gonna cheese out on me since when I called him he was acting like he was trying to pinch pennies, (I usually do the data recovery *first* in some cases, so I can get a better idea of what to charge, rather than trying to guesstimate) but fortunately, he went for a replacement drive with his data on it. Of course, he asked some other accommodations but in this situation he got to get what he was paying for.

He made it sound as if he was doing a favor for me, by paying to recover his data, so I should give him discounts....yeah. Ha. ha. ha.

Sometimes OS9 is a hindrance

2007-01-16T13:32:00.000-08:00

Got this one on my desk as a "was told the HD was bad by Apple, try to recover data". Fortunately, I suppose, for them, it's an easy one. While the drive is noisy (and failing), and took about a day to read the directory data, it seems to be proceeding well, albeit very slowly (has been running for about a day just recovering the data). Will have to see when it is done if the data is valid or not, but it seems like it should be. These situations, where it is caught early enough, are the best for everyone..
--
Looks like everything was able to be saved. The only snag I found was a few hundred files which (I assume) had been relying on the old-style MacOS type/creator instead of a file extension came through as generic "Unix Executable Files" but I made a good guess that they were audio files since they were loose in an enclosing folder for iTunes and the first 10 or so I tried as MP3 were not, but worked as MP4, put them all into a folder and created an AppleScript to rename them all to have a .m4a extension, all now opened normally in iTunes and played. Even the applications came through fine, which is not normally the case in situations like this were certain Finder info is lost.

Fortunately none of the apps were Classic (OS9) apps, those would have most likely died in the process.

More Performas...

2007-01-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

Yet another "burn all of the stuff on this (ancient) machine to an ISO9660-format CD, a Perfoma 6200 this time. Same boat as the 630. Argh. This time though, the request for ISO9660 was made by the husband, apparently a "computer expert". They want everything off the mac. everything. burned to this CD for "use in a PC". Even though it was explained that the majority of the files (applications, etc) are not going to work on a PC, and even the documents ought to be converted first. Well, I have yet to start this one since I'm busy on another, but I'll know soon exactly how usable their CD might be. Ah well, sometimes people want things like a CD backup, that they just *want*. To have, and to never even use. Because that's just "the way you're supposed to do it".
--
Well, the machine seems to have some issues. It won't boot up, and the drive won't work in any of our enclosures. Going to try one more thing to see if I can get the machine working, then look into putting the drive into some other computer, as much as I loathe that idea. However, something very interesting. This machine has a third-party drive in it, and it's quite intriguing. Not only is it one of the slimmest 3.5" HDs I've seen, but it's a 1.2gb drive from 1997. With that era and capacity, it's actually ridiculously slender.

Compared to a 1.2gb drive by another manufacturer during the same time period.
--
Was able to get the drive mounted by putting it in another machine of similar model (so that I didn't have to worry about having the right system version and whatnot) and everything copied off without issue. Not very many documents, though...a lot of applications. Well, I'll give them what they want, I suppose.

Far be it for me to question a "computer expert".
--
3/16/07
Well, here we are almost 2 months later. Hadn't been able to get ahold of them due to a wrong number and well, just kind of put it in the back of my mind. Talked to the wife this time and she stated, in fact, that she only wanted the documents and could I please convert them for Windows. Once I looked a little deeper, there was actually a series of semi-hidden nested folders with several thousand documents scattered in various folders. I am pretty sure there is lots of duplication due to the way it is all laid out, it looks like they would just duplicate folders in order to make "backups". However, I'm not going to weed through it that deeply, I am just going to convert whatever I can. The majority are various word processing files which I am converting into RTF. Thankfully I have a way to batch process this and make it easier; unfortunately there are random scattered QuarkXPress files that will actually crash the conversion process when it encounters one. Definitely an annoying bug, but she stated she didn't need the Quark files and it is....relatively easy to figure out where it jumped off the track and start it over again. It is a little bit of a pain to do so many at once though, as it doesn't seem to like to batch-process more than a few hundred files at once.
Need to get it done soon though, since I want to get this one done and out of here and I'm sure she wants her files.

ATTBB, Comcast, whatever.

2007-01-10T13:24:00.000-08:00

Well, this doesn't have any data recovery so to speak, but I figured I'd post it anyway. Back when I worked for AT&T Broadband people were always calling in about problems with their phone service, 75% of the time linked to a problem with a unit called the LPSU (or in some cases RSU). A box that went inside the house to "convert" the digital cable signal into a standard analog phone jack and provided a battery backup to keep the phone service going (for a time) if the power went out, well, it was like that in some areas, mostly in apartments and what were referred to as "multiple dwelling units" in cities and such. Other places had a separate battery unit from the main conversion box. Some areas needed no battery at all. Either way, knowing all the ways to deal with one of these and what they *should* look like but never having seen one in person, I was always a bit curious. So when I moved into an area with ATTBB (soon to be Comcast) coverage, and got the service, I was always curious to see inside the box. Which had a security bolt on it to prevent tampering...and a stiff price tag if I messed it up. However, one day I discovered one lying in the alley behind my building, along with a bunch of furniture from someone moving out. Bonus!

Seems like the box had a more functionality than it was used for, in addition to the phone jacks it had a RJ45 "Data" jack, and if you removed a concealed cover, you would find a slot inside the box for something shaped like a PCMCIA card. Inside were also two passthrough coaxial filters, I assume either to prevent the TV signal from interfering with the phone, or else to prevent people from passing through cable to get free channels (though I assume this was filtered at the main drop as well).

In addition to several (presumably semi-custom) Phillips telephony-type chips, it also had an 8-bit 33MHz 8051-series CPU, well, actually MCU (256 bytes of internal RAM, though I was surprised to not see any external RAM, maybe I missed it) and a 2-megabit (256k) "boot sector flash memory".

The big mystery is the biggest, pinniest chip on the board, branded Tellabs. Trying to find out what it is, but turning up no leads. Ah, dork-adventures. Now I'm really curious. It's suspected a FPGA of some sort by a couple secondary opinions.

A view of the outside of the box.

The internal backup battery.

The power supply board.

The board that receives and converts the digital cable signal. Lots of high-frequency oscillators and other RF parts. Not pictured: Big slab of EMI shielding I pried off.

One of the aforementioned filters.

The main board. The one area with the silvery "fence" around it also had an EMI shield that I pried off for the picture. Er, and never put back on. Also pictured, mysterious PC-card style slot and mystery Tellabs chip.

The ticking clock

2007-01-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

This machine came in with signs of a failing HD. Lots of noise, glitchy behavior, SMART failure, all the usual signs.

Unfortunately, I wasn't here and someone decided to run it for a day+ on a surface scan. When I came in, it had been running continually for more than a day, was 1/3 of the way through, and had found something like 800 bad blocks. At this point, stopped it and went ahead and tried to do data recovery on it.

Sadly, it made it about 1gb into the drive and ground to a halt with a loud clanky squeal, never to read again. Scolded anyone near me for possibly running a bad drive into the ground since there is virtually no point to run a surface scan on a known failing drive, especially after it finds more than a dozen or so bad blocks. Drove home the point of trying to get what you can, when you can, rather than trying to fix an unfixable problem. I have no guarantee that the drive wouldn't have failed anyway, but I suppose I will never know.

Moral, drive begins to fail GET YOUR DATA OFF NOW.

Sometimes, people...

2007-01-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

This hard drive was in pretty bad shape. It would read, but with continuous errors that would hangup the machine. The customer had hoped that we could recover "everything". Including applications and such. No such luck, it was in too bad of a condition to recover like that. Set it on the Users folder since that is where the majority of "crucial" information is and in a situation like this, that should be the priority first. After running for days, the dozen or so gigs of information it had gotten were half working, half broken. Some useful information, however.

Talked to her and she had actually backed up almost all of her personal info a few days prior. So really, all she wanted were the apps. Argh. Then, she revealed that she needed a backup of her email...that, I could do, provided the drive cooperated....and it did. Took a quite a while, almost all day for just the Mail folder, but it worked and seemed to recover all the information.

I love when people say they need everything, you try and get them anything, and then they turn out to only want a few very specific things and the rest is unwanted. At least I was able to get one thing she wanted that was mostly irreplaceable, the email database. I don't have much tolerance for people who want me to try and recover all of their installed applications so that they "don't have to bother with installing them all over again". Especially since most data recovery situations tend to yield broken applications in one of a dozen different ways, anyway.

Performa Hijinx. Not really.

2007-01-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

Found this machine waiting for me when I got back from holiday vacation. "Burn all Word files to ISO9660 CD". Go to find out why since the one guy here seems to think ISO9660 is the magical do-all format when it has a fair amount of detractors to use it in this day and age. Find out that it is to use the files on a PC "of indeterminate age". Deeply suspect that MS Word will be nowhere found on this Performa (it's a Performa 631, this places it circa 1994-95 or so) and that it will be instead whatever word-processor-of-the-month that was included on it, some form of a *-Works most likely. Customer however is insistent that it is Word.
Finally get the computer up and lo and behold, all 300-some documents are ClarisWorks format. Call the customer to let them know that each file will need to be converted into some other format, like RTF or MS Word if they want them to be used on a PC properly. Which, of course, will take some time. They approve it, and thus begins the hassle. See, the Performa 6xx series was the first line to use IDE for their internal HDs (I think there may have been one or two 5xx's but they were in the minority). For this reason, they are always a pain. Normally, for old machines I can put the internal (SCSI) drive into an external enclosure to work with it. I also have devices to use IDE drives externally, but for whatever reason, none of them ever work with these drives, no matter what I do. I assume it's because they are doing something unusual or nonstandard, given their age/early-life-ness...and the external SCSI drive I will hook up to machines in the other cases, well, it's a 2gb drive, partitioned, yes, but it still has issues with machines running system 7.x...which is inevitably what these machines are running.
The final alternative is to try and put it on the network, but there are major obstacles with that as well, including most of the machines not having ethernet and none of the localtalk->ethernet converters we have seeming to work anymore. So, with no other options, I scrounged up a SCSI drive to put in an enclosure to hook up to the computer. Went through several enclosures and several drives before I found a working set. Copied everything over. Now, a "quick" conversion should set everything straight. Hopefully...
--
Everything converted fine, except for a small amount of files made using one of those weird nonstandard, showed-up-for-a-while-in-the-90s-then-vanished applications, aka, "The Writing Center". Those had an unusual format so I just saved them directly as Plain Text for her to manually remove the garbage since it wasn't just at the beginning and end but scattered throughout, most likely due to formatting at such. Burned to CD.

Avaya Explorations

2006-12-10T12:43:00.000-08:00

At some point, I should go about trying to order the replacement. I kind of don't want the responsibility of spending the company's money on something in case it doesn't work properly or something like that, and convincing my boss that it's unfixable and that the replacement will be, very likely near $1000. (He also mentioned casually about using this as an excuse to migrate to an entirely VoIP system. Thankfully, I think that would be a bit too involved and expensive to justify)

So, I've been putting it off just a little bit. For the most part, people are adjusting somewhat to the lack of voicemail.

In the meantime! Pictures. Since I couldn't fix it, and no one else wanted to either, I may as well dig inside of it. If no one else will tell me anything about it, I'll have to find out for myself. They came out a bit blurry because I had the camera on the wrong setting when I zoomed in...and because my hands weren't still enough, dunno.

The Module in the main unit with the 2 other modules, and by itself...on the floor.

Contents of unit.
1 PC-card form factor "2-port" card. Used to back up user-data to its internal flash memory, this appears to also fulfill some sort of licensing, as Avaya also refers to it as a 'license card'. Enables the number of accessible lines for the voicemail system as well. (This card is actually accessible directly from a slot on the outside.)

IBM Travelstar DJSA-205 / 07N4391 2.5" 4200rpm 5gb ATA Drive

2x Altera MAX EPM7064STC100-10 EEPROM-based programmable logic device
2x AMD AM28F1600B 16Mbit Boot-block flash memory
1x IDT 7024 4Kx16 Dual-port RAM
1x IDT 71016 64Kx16 Static RAM
4x Samsung K6T8016C3M 512kx16 Static RAM
1x Level one LXT905PC Universal Ethernet Interface Adaptor
1x Motorola MC68EN302PV25BT Integrated Multiprotocol Processor w/ Ethernet (here's the CPU)
1x Agere 1053BD 0144T (I assume this is related to the actual telephony aspects)
Miscellaneous buffer/drivers, hex inverters, gates, bus transceivers, oscillators, and some 'mystery chips'.

Avaya...adventures?

2006-12-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

Here at work we have an Avaya system. A Partner ACS system to be specific. It had been acting up for a while, either the voicemail system would go offline and all calls into it would get a busy signal, or else it would randomly roll back time and deleted messages would come back and new ones would disappear, only to reappear a few days later. The box itself was making noises that sounded like it had a failing hard drive in it. Whenever it went truly offline, you could actually hear knocking noises, but if you powered the box down and back up it would sometimes start working again. Went through a hellish rigamarole trying to get any sort of advice from Avaya, after finding that our local rep had disappeared (or at least, the company handling the service aspect). But, in the process, I did get to find out that the unit did indeed contain a hard drive. I also found out that Avaya wanted to charge us a ton to even come out and look at it, and the local rep I did manage to track down wanted to replace the whole unit for well over a thousand dollars (I want to say $1200 or $1500, I can't remember now).
Well, then my boss turned to me and said "So, you said this sounds like it's a hard drive problem? Sounds like it's right up your alley."
...
So I did a lot of research, well, as much as I could. Much like Cisco, it appears that the great majority of information about Avaya stuff is guarded, hoarded, what have you, either by the company, or by those who wish to make money repairing it. I don't blame them, but it does make it frustrating. What little I found through searching revealed the following information; Avaya hard drives are not only a special format, but contain some special information unique to your unit like a serial number and the like. Uh, that was basically it. Whee.

So when the system crashed again, I thought, you know...if we're going to try and replace the hard drive with something else, I ought to try and image it, since if it is to be replaced at all, I will need to retain this information before the drive crashes completely.
Opened the unit. For being such a big box, it's relatively simple inside. Had a IBM Travelstar 2.5" drive in it. 5gb.
Got ready to hook it up to a computer, first making sure that the drive would not be automatically mounted, on the off chance that it the computer would recognize it and try to make some sort of changes to it.

Using dd, made an image of it. It has a single 1.5gb-ish FAT16 partition. The rest is filled with data, but I cannot tell if it's some other format, or just raw data for the VM platform. For instance, the messages. I'd like to look into it more, but I'll save that for later.
...
In the meantime, the system now no longer works at all. Before, I could hear it attempting to spin up the drive and the LED on the unit would flicker between orange and green, sometimes eventually managing to start up. Now, it stays orange from power on and does nothing else. I can't imagine what could have caused that, my only theory is that despite my best efforts, *some* change was written to the drive causing the Avaya system to reject it now. There was a flurry of activity when the drive was plugged in and ejected from the system. However, it may not be the drive as just for argument's sake, I disconnected the drive to see if it would make a difference and the system still does the exact same thing. And if I plug the drive into a powered connector externally, it spins up and does all the normal sort of hard-drive-like things. So, I dunno.

Looks like we're getting a new system now. Fortunately, I found a good deal on a newer unit (R7 where ours is R1) which has some nice features like being able to have your voicemail messages emailed directly to you and some various network-accessible features, and I was able to make a backup to the system's PC card before it went down, so I should be able to restore it. Hopefully.

Avaya: 1, Me: 0.

In the meantime, I plan on fully examining the guts of our unit. If no one else has info on it, then I will.

Never a good sign.

2006-11-28T14:08:00.000-08:00

"Directories may have been deleted"
This is never a good description of a problem, for various reasons.

The customer wasn't even sure what he had done. It might have been cleaning out a drive and mistakenly throwing away the files and then running DiskWarrior on top of it...but he wasn't quite sure. Needless to say, the files were so very important. The drive was a 200gb external FW drive, and actually kind of interesting; it was the first drive I had worked with that was branded by Glyph. Apparently they are well-known for making quiet drive enclosures, and boy was that true...I could barely tell when the drive was even on.

Anyway, none of the "easy" methods uncovered his files. He wasn't too sure what format all of his files were in, but they were all audio recordings, so I set it to filter for the common ones, AIFF and WAV. After a few hours of running it had only uncovered a couple gigabytes of unnamed WAV files, when I described them to him he said that those were mainly unimportant ones, and that the drive should be about half-filled.
Well, I used a different program and set it on a detailed scrounging of the whole drive for directory fragments and was able to find, after a day or two of scanning, about 50gb of miscellaneous files. While it wasn't half of the drive's total capacity, when he came in and examined them he was pretty sure they were what he needed. Had him get a secondary drive to put them on, in case he found something that wasn't recovered we could try another shot at recovering it...wouldn't want to overwrite the old data with what was being recovered.

Yet another floppy

2006-11-28T13:09:00.000-08:00

An old 3.5" floppy was waiting for me today. 800k format, which meant i had to use my "this is for old stuff" workstation.

Was told that it contained some rare recipes made in some old recipe program and could I convert them into text and print them out, oh and the disk might be damaged too. Went into it thinking I was going to have to research old recipe programs circa 1989. What do I find? A disk that immediately mounts when inserted. With 3 plain text files named "Recipes" mixed in with some random system files. Printed them out, called the customer, and she insists there's a whole ton of recipes on there. Scour the disk. Nothing. find out later that they threw out all their other old disks and only kept this particular one because it had "recipes" written on the label, knowing that her mother put a lot of recipes into the old computer and they want them now.

Yeah...Oh well. The rest must have been on one of the other "unimportant" disks.

Open Firmware. Closed off.

2006-10-19T13:11:00.000-07:00

This wasn't a data recovery, per se, but it was close, and kind of interesting. Customer brought in his machine because he was "locked out". Slightly fishy if you ask me, but on closer investigation I think he was just monkeying where he didn't belong.
See, there were signs of him spending waaaaay too much time lurking around logged in as root and mucking around with hacky things, not only did the root home folder have a ton of crap in it, but there were all sorts of little scripts and shell apps strewn around in folders with names like "cool stuff" and such. But the main problem was, in addition to NetInfo being all kinds of trashed, the password couldn't be reset because you couldn't boot off of a CD because the Open Firmware password was turned on, which locks out basically *everything* (booting from external drives, booting from CDs, putting the machine in target disk mode, etc). And you couldn't reset that password because you needed the admin password to do so. Vicious circle.

Previously, one could reset the OF password by doing a series of things (remove part of the RAM from the machine, start up, immediately reset PRAM, go into OF and reset NVRAM, shut off and put back whatever you pulled out)...however, Apple 'fixed' this ability in the last run of G5s so that one could no longer reset it using this method. After trying a whole slew of ways to force the system to boot off of a CD and failing, I finally thought of something. What if I booted off of another hard drive which had a good install of OSX *and* I knew the admin password for? Tracked down a SATA drive which had a version of the OS which would boot this machine. Installed it in the G5 and booted it up. Ran the OpenFirmware Password utility, and used the admin password I knew to turn it off. Success.

Now, removed it, put the old drive back in, and booted up off of the system CD. Ran the Password Reset Utility. Changes seemed to take, but upon reboot, found that they did not. Both the main user and root would not reset their password properly, tried a few more times but no success. After many tries and failures, ended up backing up all the data to be safe (now that I could get the computer to go into disk mode) and deleting the main and root user entries from NetInfo Manager and recreating them. Created a new user, set it to the old GUID, moved all the files back, finally, finally everything seemed to work. This was when I found all the root shenanigans. Ah, well. Sometimes people think they know more than they do, and try to do things that they shouldn't. I'm pretty sure that most of his efforts were to try and make his computer more secure from 'intruders' which is why it's a little amusing he ended up locking himself out.

Of GUIDs, and Apple Partion Maps.

2006-10-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

So. Apple has once again redesigned an aspect of their system software, breaking existing software in the process. With their new Intel macs, they have changed the type of partition scheme that they use, from the venerable (going all the way back to the first versions of Apple System Software) Apple Partition Map to the Intel GUID Partition Table. This is not a frivolous chance as it is directly tied into, and seemingly required by the switch to Intel hardware. However, all old disk repair/maintenance software now has to be rewritten to work with these drives, (and all versions of Mac OS prior to 10.3.9 will not recognize them at all). If the drives are able to mount on their own, some of the non-updated programs will see the drive but still, one is squeamish about doing anything with it...and if the drives are malfunctioning, the majority of them will either ignore them or report them damaged beyond repair. At this time, only one program has been truly rewritten, which is TechTool Pro.

Thusly, the most recent machine, which was a MacBook, was a bit of a trouble. There seems to be a small issue that has popped up with a couple MacBooks (2, maybe 3, so far?) where the drive just randomly and abruptly fails, and upon investigation is scattered full of I/O errors. When this came in, the drive had done just that, "stopped working one day". Would not mount on the desktop. Reported many errors that Apple's Disk Utility could not fix. None of the existing software would boot the machine, much less see the drive. When booted in target disk mode hooked up to another computer, none of the software would reliably read the drive.

However! The drive would show up as a physical device, even if the volume was totally inaccessible. Seeing that disk1s3 was marked as Apple_HFS (as it should be) I had a theory, a gamble. Perhaps, even though the partition map format was changed, the physical partition type remained the same. So, I took another 60gb drive (ATA instead of SATA, but that is neither here nor there and was mostly for my own convenience) and formatted it on a G4, using apple's older partitioning scheme. I then used dd to do a block-copy of the HFS partition data on the MacBook drive (rather than the entire drive including partition map data, drivers, free space, and all that sort of of data that you get on a whole drive image, which I normally do)

dd bs=512 if=/dev/disk1s3 of=/HFSData.dmg

I then looked at the freshly formatted second drive, the one using the Apple scheme. The HFS partition was slice 10 (although that is not always the case) I then used dd to restore the image to that slice directly.

dd bs=512 if=/HFSData.dmg of=/dev/disk2s10

Since the bad data was copied with the good, it didn't become magically healed by copying to a new drive...however, all of the standard utilities could now see it. Was able to use a magical mixture of utilities to get the drive mounted long enough to copy all of the data off. While a lot of it was scattered around, I believe I was able to get 95% of the data.
Didn't use Data Rescue as it gave me a load of corrupted data one more time, it's begun to disappoint me as it's given me what looked like a full recovery of files, which 100% contained garbage data, the last 3 times. Need to figure out what causes that to happen.

The G5...and Serial ATA.

2006-09-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

I've noticed, some of the SATA drives in certain G5 towers seem to be dying abruptly. I wonder if this is that thermal issue I had heard about some time ago, but I thought that only related to the very first G5s and I have seen it in later G5s as well.

The usual. Doesn't boot, but at least gets to the Apple logo and spinning gear where it just hangs forever. Pages of unfixable errors in fsck. Surface scan shows a lot of bad blocks. Using dd, block-copied drive to another 250gb drive. Took a days. Then, was able to recover the data intact...well, 95% or so...but the broken parts were in the system folder so not a big problem.

I think I'm going to start keeping track of which drives are doing this rather than the model of machine. I'm thinking it might be that more likely than the machine, thermal issues aside.

KFS Mystery! (aka: Oh, Apple...)

2006-09-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while it's necessary to send a computer in to Apple's repair depot, rather than doing the repair in-house. Either it's less expensive for the customer, it's quicker/easier, or the part actually requires it since it cannot be obtained externally. However, there is a reasonable chance given certain circumstances (some of which I still have yet to figure out) where the depot technicians will erase the customer's hard drive. For this reason we *usually* back up the customer's data beforehand, to be on the safe side... since if they didn't back up, we would be the easiest ones to find blame with if their precious pictures and such are gone forever. Recently, a PowerBook was sent in whose only issue was a dented/damaged case. This was cheaper and quicker for the customer to dispatch to Apple, since replacing the parts separately and the labor required was less than the flat rate for that repair. However, for some unexplainable reason (the repair was entered as "only address damaged housing, no other isssues") the machine came back with it's hard drive erased...or was it?

Here's where it gets interesting.
The original data appeared to be gone. The hard drive appeared to have its contents replaced with some type of Apple diagnostic software I had never seen before, set to automatically run diagnostics at startup. (It also referred to it as "burn-in" which makes me think that it was some sort of "let it run for X amount of time, unless it fails" diagnostic that is run, perhaps assembly-line fashion)
It looked very similar to Apple Hardware Test and Service Diagnostics, but yet different. Also, it was failing its own tests and rebooting, requesting to be sent back for "rework". So it's even funnier that it came back in that condition.

I then noticed that the "drive" was only 8gb or so in size. The physical drive was 60gb. The boot "test" partition was type Apple_HFS. I then discovered that there was another partition on the drive right before it of Apple_KFS, a type I had never heard of before. Googled and wikipedia'd KFS to discover that it is a format used by a unix-like OS called Plan 9. Found this site with a bunch of info, it actually sounds rather interesting...
http://cm.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/plan_9_wiki/

But, nothing to do with Apple anywhere that I could find. After a fair amount of reading, decided that this wasn't going to get me anywhere.

Then, I had a theory. What if the data wasn't gone? What if Apple, in this case, perhaps ala bootcamp, created a partition in the free space at the end of the drive with this test information, and did something to preserve and disable the original data. While this was the first time that an "erased" drive came back in this particular state (certainly none had *ever* come back with some sort of diagnostic software still trying to run), it's not inconceivable that this was the case. Using Norton Disk Editor, took a look at the partition. Hmm. It did look like something, perhaps the customer data, was there. Tried a few tactics to recover data from the drive. Data Rescue "recovered" something but the files were unusable. Didn't want to try to "fix" it since getting the data was important. Used dd to make an image of the drive, tried to manually edit the partition data (change one letter from K to H) to see if I could just make it be HFS, see, I had a theory that it actually *was* HFS and the name change was just to, well, disable it as an unknown filesystem. Unfortunately, nothing I did seemed to work, well, also it was more the fact that trying to edit a 60gb disk image was too cumbersome in most programs except Norton Disk Editor which refused to save the changes.

However, I had a moment of inspiration. If the partition truly is HFS and is simply changed in the partition map (which is what it did indeed look like, the first block of the actual partition was indeed recognizable HFS data), what if I just ...tricked the computer?
Had to monkey with mount_hfs for a minute or two trying various arguments, finally created an empty directory in /Volumes to be a dummy mount point. Found the right combination of options, which was actually relatively simple.

Something along the lines of:
mount_hfs /dev/disk1s4 /Volumes/MacHD/

Voila! After a minute or so of churning, got a desktop icon for the drive, made a disk image of it (this took quite a while), verified the data copied correctly, reformatted the drive to obliterate the weird partitioning scheme and diagnostic software**, restored the disk image to the drive. Had a few little glitches trying to unmount said drive that I needed to clean up and then restart the computer, but still, that seems normal given the trickery I had to perform.
Unfortunately, it didn't go off perfectly, I needed to reinstall the system since the way I made the disk image (image from folder rather than image from drive, since disk utility didn't recognize the pseudo-mount as a volume) prevented OSX from transferring appropriately... but, a reinstall and we were ready to go.

**(of course, I saved a disk image of the weird diagnostic software so I can examine it more fully when I get a chance. It's intriguing-looking, although it was basically just throwing an error and exiting as soon as it started up, perhaps because it was missing some resource it needed, it put up some interesting messages and errors beforehand.)

Silverlining, non-cloud-type

2006-07-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

Customer brought in an external hard drive that the computer would no longer see (or ask to initialize, depending on how he tried to access it) ever since he upgraded to a machine running OSX.

Scratched my head for a bit on why it wasn't seeing the drive until I noticed it had been formatted with Silverlining (it was a LaCie drive, Silverlining was the app they bundled with it for additional formatting options, that sort of thing). Called him up, turns out, yes, as a matter of fact he did, and he had enabled a security password in order to mount the drive. Well, there's the problem. A quick check of LaCie's website did confirm my suspicions that this ability was discontinued and no longer supported under OSX. To make matters worse, the drive had other issues that needed to be repaired that were preventing it from trying to mount itself using it's own driver and I was very wary of trying to run repairs on an unmounted, third-party-driver-protected volume. Could find no current version of Silverlining in existence for OSX that would remove this feature. Found a machine that could both boot into OS9 and be able to access the drive and then began a hunt for an old copy of Silverlining, which was actually a bit difficult. Seemingly due to the fact that this was one of the first USB external drives, there was a very specific window of versions I could use, too new and it didn't detect the drive, too old and it didn't detect the drive. Tried various combinations of it inside and outside the enclosure (via a firewire drivedock) as well. Went through every copy we had including digging through lots of random boxes of old software until finally I tracked down one that would work. Was able to mount the drive and remove the protection, so that I could now try and repair the other issues. Repaired enough of them to get the drive mounting, though it was obviously failing as it had sounded pretty terrible the entire time.

Copied everything up to a new firewire drive and explained how to make an encrypted disk image if he still wanted a protected portion of his drive.

Adventures with partitions

2006-07-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Guy checks in a PowerBook, says that the drive is going out. Run the typical check over it and it's obvious the drive is failing, in addition to the odd noises the machine is making, it's got a lot of bad blocks, and the typical programs report i/o errors.
Can't run the usual data recovery apps or even DiskWarrior because they all report the drive as unformatted (or it doesn't even show up).
Since the disk is obviously physically failing on top of all that, made a dd image of the whole drive. Ended up putting a fan on the drive because it kept getting really hot and stalling out (this is something I do (sometimes even with a heatsink) for a fair amount of failing drives, they tend to get hot during days-long recovery attempts and keeping them cooler seems to make things work better... of course, maybe it's all psychological, who knows). Then discovered that the drive was not reading reliably (kept timing out and skipping the block it was on) when laying flat...happened to discover one of the several times I picked it up to check on it that it would reliably read when held vertically. So, I propped it up on its end, perpendicular to the table...with the fan on it.

After about a day, the image finished, with a good deal of i/o errors (and thusly, skipped blocks), mainly in the first 1/3 of the drive.
Then, restored the image to another 80gb drive.
Talked to the customer about what he might want recovered specifically since the drive was still being difficult, acting like it was an unformatted drive...He tells me he "tried some things on it that didn't work", looking at the drive it's beyond any kind of easy solution. Come to find out that one of his "fixes" was to try to reformat the drive, (don't ask me why since his data is important enough for him to want to recover it now). Which obliterated the partition table (the first dozen or so blocks are rewritten with 00s).
Now, came the "fun" part. Used Norton Disk Editor to sift through the raw data of the drive to find the locations that the various partitions and such were located at (there are usually 3-5 different sections on a standard one-partition drive, drivers, actual data, and free/unallocated space.)... the drivers were fairly easy because they were towards the beginning, the HFS partition a little less so, since I had to determine the overall size and such as well). Had to then reconstruct the partition map and individual entries using only the Hex Editor. (well, at first, once I made it recognizably a partition entry I was able to invoke norton's template to finish it up).

To the left, 00s. To the right, how it appeared once the proper information was typed in. (There were 3 or 4 entries to make in this fashion)

Oh, that's how it is, eh? Now you give me the nice template.

And now, the header data for the main partition itself

Had to get a little assistance from reading the partition data of another drive to get an idea of how it needed to be entered, it was tedious, but not terribly so. Once I got that working, the drive would still not mount, of course, since some key parts of it were still missing or damaged, but I was able to now read the main portion as a HFS volume and recover all of the data using...hmm, Data Rescue, I believe.

Floppies yet again

2006-07-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Got another 800k floppy. These always require going to the older machine, since it needs to be read in one of the old built-in Apple 3.5 drives, preferably under a pre-OS9 system, newer systems get all sorts of glitchy behavior. So, at newest, the Beige G3. This disk allegedly contained a resume, in Aldus Pagemaker of all formats.
Unfortunately, totally unrecoverable, it's almost as if the disk was demagnetized. The computer would not detect the disk in any way, I tried several different computers and drives, even using the oldest one (circa 1986) I had access to. If the disk wasn't immediately ejected it reported as being "No Disk" by pretty much every program I tried to run on it. Even norton, several versions, reported it as a non-existant disk and wouldn't allow any sort of access to it.

Tried to use several of the old-school bitcopy programs but it also failed. Ah, well. Sometimes things are just too late.

Aluminun G4 Woes.

2006-06-28T14:29:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that a lot of the Aluminum PowerBook G4s have their drives fail in a similar way...one day they're working fine and then abruptly programs begin running slower and quitting unexpectedly and within a matter of days the drive starts making rattling noises and stops working. I don't know if it's heat, or a certain run of drives, or what, but there has been a significant amount of them. The drives won't stay spun up unless I leave a fan on them, usually with a heatsink for good measure, which is what makes me think it's heat, although it could also just be the drive doing some sort of self-imposed spindown when it detects it's temperature has gotten into a certain range, which it is getting to with all of the continued re-reading the drive is being made to do.

Also, they're damaged just enough to make the normal recovery-type programs not work on them. Usually, what I end up doing, is making an image using dd, and then restoring that image to a new drive and recovering from it. This serves two purposes, it tries to capture every block it can and simply skips the ones which fail (filling them with zeroes) and it makes a copy of what it can and spares having to do multiple tries on an already failing drive instead giving me a more healthy drive to take multiple attempts at. This method has succeeded the majority of the time, each with it's own take on how to actually recover the data from the cloned drive.

In this particular case it was also a friend's drive so I definitely wanted to go all out and she only lost a handful of files, sadly a bunch of them were huge render files for Final Cut but fortunately they were old projects and she had them backed up.

The Prototype Portable. (Protoble? Portaproto? Hmm.)

2005-09-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

OK. So, we got in a Macintosh Portable as a donation where I work, for an Apple Museum we are putting together. (aka the Macseum, hah).
Upon investigation, the Portable was actually a pre-release version, it had some markings on it designating it as such. (Return to Apple when done, do not sell or lease, tracked item, etc)... Since the person who loaned/donated it to us had gotten it from Apple, and it had been in Apple's hands when it left, (and is what...15+ years old, now?), don't think there were any worries about that.

Didn't boot up at all though, and some little bit of something was rattling around inside. Took off the back cover and found the bit, looks like some sort of latch-piece but I could not figure out where in the world it would go. My thought was that it was part of the reset/interrupt switch but could find no evidence of it going there either.

Battery was completely dead, but here's the funny thing... it actually charged up! It went from 1v to 5-6v in some hours of charging... the internal 9v PRAM battery was reasonably charged as well... but still, it didn't turn on despite my best efforts.
Discovered that if I took out the PRAM battery, and the 'normal' battery, left them out for a minute, plugged it in and then put back in the 9v and then shortly after the other, and then flipped the power switch a few times, I could get it to come on, sort of. Would get a screen half-black, half-full of staticy garbage. Also, some hideous squawky noises, like 1/4 of a sad mac chime combined with buzzes and pops. Was in the middle of trying to figure out what was wrong when my boss came in to let me know that the guy who loaned it to use said that it had never worked the whole time he had it, which was almost the whole time. So scrapped the whole 'getting it to work' part.

Then, I thought...well... maybe this has something interesting on the hard drive, at the very least, it's something I can easily get access to.
But I was wrong. You see, the portable has a special, hard-wired (as far as I can tell, I didn't try and force it off the board) 34-pin connector that includes power and data, sort of like the one used in later PowerBooks, except that the drive was a full 3.5" instead of 2.5", and the connector was a normal-size (albeit shorter) connector.

Found some info on the internet on this connector. Found a couple sites with pinouts, and a place selling one for $45... but of course, I didn't want to buy a cable for that price for what is most likely a one-time use... so I set about trying to make the cable.
Boy, was it a pain. First I had to find and desolder 2 50-pin SCSI connectors from boards, since I had a ton handy...Then, cut one of them down to 34 pins... Soldering wires to connectors is definitely up there in annoying and tedious, plus I managed to burn myself several times.
Get it all together... decide to put some hot-glue around the pins on the connector end to stabilize them. Had a bright idea to use an existing SCSI cable instead of individual wires, which saved a little time.

Get it all done, plug it in..
It doesn't work. In fact, with the drive plugged in via the cable, the machine won't even boot... not even a pointer or a flashing question mark. And I mean, plugged in, in an external enclosure, even when it is not even powered on. (of course, if I do power it on it makes the correct-sounding series of noises, albeit, the drive sounds a bit cranky, for a drive spinning up and wanting to start up... not exploding, squealing, or bursting into flames which were all concerns, of course)
So assumedly, something is amiss. I recall that while making the cable, there were a ton of GND (Ground) connections on the 50-pin that were NC (not connected) on the 34-pin connection... perhaps I should have grounded them on something? Also, the drive doesn't supply termination power... was I supposed to supply that some other way? Both of these are good questions, unanswered by the info I found (though admittedly, all the instructions I found were for making an adapter to hook a 50-pin drive up to the 34-pin connector, not the other way around...perhaps, an important distinction.)

Well, I think... perhaps I am just trying it on too new of a machine, this is after all a beige G3 it is hooked up to... let's try it, internally, on an older machine. Grab a random laying-around-LC and pop it open. Plug in the drive. Same thing, doesn't boot but makes a series of hopeful noises.
As I am thinking 'geez...do I have to try making another cable?' It then occurs to me, the internal 40mb drive used on a lot of early macs is very, very similar to the portable's. Both "Apple 40SC" Conner 40mb drives... one digit different in the model number (CP-3040 vs CP-3045) ... look at the board itself, and it looks virtually identical.

With a "what have I got to lose?" I decide to switch out the drive controller boards. Hook up the drive in an enclosure back to the powermac and voila! It mounts (after rebuilding the desktop). The drive sounds horrible tho, it's making a sort of ringy-squeaky noise, but hey, maybe I can get data off of it. (it was making a lesser version of the noise before, I can only assume it was spinning/accessing less when it was just solely powered-on and spinning up)

And... I do. The whole drive manages to copy, although it did have some intermittent disk errors through the process.

Did I find something cool? Some pre-release, beta version of the System Software? Some cool Apple apps?

Nope.
AppleLink. Aldus Persuasion. MacWrite. System 6.0.7. Really, nothing at all noteworthy.

Archaic Floppy Disks.

2005-06-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

Got a packet of 3.5" floppy disks to copy the files off of, to a CD. Mostly 800k, but there were two 400k ones as well. Needed to track down an old computer to read them**, ended up going with a SE running System 6 since 400k disks have not read reliably in most of the later versions of MacOS. Most of the disks copied without issue, a couple said that they were unreadable but after inserting and ejecting them a few times they began to work...I have seen this behavior before, I assume that something must be...sticking, I guess...with the disk, and needs to be "shaken loose". Otherwise, I have no good explanation. One disk was fully unreadable and irreperable but I was able to use a very old version of Norton UnErase, set it on "Search by file types", since the customer had indicated that they were MacWrite and MS Word files, recovered all the (now named things like Word File#1) files I could find on the disk. They all seemed to contain valid info, so put everything together and burned it to a CD.

**All older Apple 3.5 disks in 800k and 400k (GCR) format must be read in an older Mac's floppy drive. The current range of 3.5" floppy drives are only capable of reading the PC-style (MFM) formatting, 720k and 1.44mb.
Apple's FDHD drive (The "Original SuperDrive") was unique at the time in that it read both types of formatting used at the time, (GCR and MFM), enabling it to easily read the older and current formats, as well as enable some PC-compatibility.
SuperDrive - Wikipedia

All of the current (USB, for the most part) 3.5 drives are based around the PC-style, MFM-only hardware.
I'm not even sure that it would be possible to make an external USB GCR floppy drive.
Well, ok. Many things are possible with time and money. But it's improbable that any company would invest the time and money into it now, when they didn't 9 years ago when it would have actually made more sense (when the iMac was first introduced, formally ending the use of internal 3.5 drives in the Macintosh)

GCR - Wikipedia
MFM - Wikipedia

Audio Scavenger Hunt

2005-05-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

Customer was using Cubase and deleted all of his audio files from within the program's built-in browser, thinking that it would leave the originals on the drive...nope, apparently not.
He was not sure of the file names, since they were assigned by the program, or the type or size, but the total files should amount to about 11gb.
--
Decided that they were probably AIFF since that was the format of the other audio files on his computer. Ran directory scan, but I could find no traces of them on the drive anywhere, perhaps since they were deleted in a non-standard manner. (I'm not even sure how cubase stores its files, it could very well maintain it's own directory-type database).
--
Decided to run full-disk scavenge of directory fragments overnight. Scan completed over the weekend but found no recoverable audio files. Mostly OS-related files. Perhaps program deleted files directly somehow.
--
Created file signature template using 25 example files of type AIFF from customers remaining files on HD. Started recovery.
--
Recovery complete, 3,631 files recovered totaling 12.4 gb, files ranging in size from 8kb-40mb. Opened 24 at random, many were distorted/noise which means is not valid/incomplete data (or possibly an unknown audio codec not installed on this machine) but many were valid data, most were music of some sort

The headcrash.

2005-02-28T14:27:00.000-08:00

Got in an old Beige G3 tower with a failed hard drive. The customer wanted some photos recovered from it. The drive made a horrendous scrapy-shrieking noise when it was powered on, sort of like someone was rubbing steel wool on a clay pot while scraping their nails down a chalkboard.

Told the customer that really, her only option was DriveSavers as the drive had most likely had/was having a head crash, since there was nothing that could be done other than possibly taking the drive apart and transplanting it's platters into another drive. She declined as the price for DriveSavers was high (she was looking to spend around $100) and just abandoned the machine here since she had a new machine already and whatnot.

Having never seen a crashed drive up close, I took the top off the drive. There was actually a blackened trough in the middle of the drive where the head had stuck and proceeded to dig a ditch into the platter's surface. The drive was also filled with a very fine soot and a sort of...metallic crumbs.

The ThaiMac

2004-09-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I get something really interesting in the shop as a donation, recycle, or abandon. Sometimes it goes into the "for the museum" pile, sometimes it gets taken apart, sometimes I just mess with it and go "Hmmmm...". Got in a Performa 575, not too unusual in itself, except that it had an Apple keyboad....in Thai. So I thought, let me look and see if this has localized system software. But the machine wouldn't boot...drive made a series of strange noises, sort of like a "flinga-flinga-fling-thud" noise. After a few of the usual pokes and prods, decided it was a mechanical problem, but it was a sort of noise I hadn't really heard before.
So, just for the hell of it, and since I had really nothing to lose, I took the top off the drive. Everything looked normal-ish. Plugged it in to power and the heads were doing something interesting, they were trying to move but stopping and pulling back, and the platters would give about a half spin, stop, slowly move, and then stop again. Put my fingers on the spindle and moved the platter manually and could feel a "sticky spot". Poked the head-locking mechanism so that the heads would move freely and worked the platter back and forth a couple times until it was moving freely as well. Moved everything back into place, and what the heck, let's plug it in and see what it does. Now we all know, you shouldn't open drives because of dust contamination and whatnot, but hey, once again what is there to lose. Well lo and behold, no strange sounds, and the drive actually spun up and showed itself to the system.

It did indeed have a Thai localized version of the system. Since back in the day, apple seemed to call their Asian system software software (this was 7.1) xxxxTalk (such as KanjiTalk for Japan), this was "'ThaiTalk" aka 7.1TH.
Whee.

I copied a couple of the system files off the drive just for the heck of it, and then threw it away, there was really nothing else of interest on there. Plus, you know, the drive was pretty much no good at this point...it was starting to sound worse and act flaky towards the end.

The DataFrame.

2003-10-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Back in the 80s, when drives were hideously expensive, a lot of companies did creative things for external storage, either out of cost, necessity, or ain't-it-cool factor. The DataFrame wasn't really especially cool, but it was sort of strange. An external SCSI drive, but not really. Rather than being a SCSI drive in an enclosure, it was an oddball type of drive with some sort of SCSI bridge. I don't recall of it was one of the MFM Seagate drives, or a MiniScribe...but needless to say it was odd.

The only way to access it was using the specific piece of software that came with it in the early 80s; a type of software called a "Desk Accessory" which lost popularity in System 7 and pretty much died out by the mid-late 90s.
It did some semi unusual things, you could set the SCSI ID# using the software (usually this is a switch or jumper on the drive), you could send some interesting commands to the drive to start and stop it, self-test, that sort of thing.

Found one somewhere..a thrift store maybe? Not sure. Got it home, and of course. The drive didn't seem to work. It spun up, made a very loud ratatatatat noise and then spun down. Tracked down the weird, ancient software and started messing around with it. Well, in my few times messing with it, I noticed that I could tell the drive to self-test (which would immediately fail), and after doing it once or twice it seemed to spin slightly longer with a little less noise (but still a lot), and out of curiosity, I made it do a self-test about, oh, a dozen or two times...and by the end, on the last one, it just spun up, and mounted on the desktop. Maybe it had a sticking brake or something, I'm not sure. But it got unstuck. Drive was empty. and 20mb.

Hooray, that was time well-spent. At least I got to play with one after seeing one years ago in a closet at school that the teacher wouldn't let me touch much less hook up and look at. Not that there is really anything that inherently interesting about a bulky, beige-colored metal box.

Moving right along...

1999-01-01T13:25:00.000-08:00

My stepfather has a bad habit of being impatient and impulsive. This has led to him going so far as to break electronics in frustration (throwing something down on the floor and such). Not all the time, but sometimes.

He got a digital camera one day. Fairly nice for the time, I think it was 2-and-some megapixles. (This was in the 1999 or so)
It would occasionally take a very long time to save to the memory card, CompactFlash which I have never known to be that speedy. I don't know if this was a flaw, or a bug, or just the way it was, sometimes it took a few seconds, sometimes it didn't, but if you left it for about 5-6 minutes it would eventually beep and be done. His solution was to try to turn it on and off to "fix it". The camera had a safety feature that wouldn't let you turn it off if it was writing to the card. His answer? Pull the batteries out. This would work sometimes, losing the picture in the process, but often it would corrupt the whole card. He did this a few times and then asked me to try and get his pictures for him.
Basically, I had to use a program to capture an entire raw image of the card, I don't remember what program this was but it was OS8 era. Being unable to actually get the image mounting or fixed in any way, I actually opened the disk image in a hex editor. Then I opened a few JPEGs taken by the camera. Noticed that they had a common 16-byte header (actually 20 or so, now that I think about it) and EOF marker. This led to one of the most tedious data recoveries ever. Doing a search for the header, copying and pasting the data of each jpeg file into a new empty file and saving it, opening it to verify. After a few worked I stopped the verifying part until at the end. After a couple hundred or so, this got very, very monotonous.
After I finished I told him "I did this once. It was a pain in the butt. I'm not doing it again if you screw this up because I know it's because you're impatient with the camera"

A few weeks later? Yep. I tell him no, he gets huffy and goes to my mom, who comes in first asking, then entreating, and finally demanding since you know I live under their roof etc etc. Fine. Do it again. Make a point that if he wants to keep screwing up his cards there are companies to help him. If they're going to kick me out of the house because he's an ass...well, I guess I said that knowing that they really wouldn't, but really, I wanted to point out how petty it was.
A month later, I see him screwing with the computer. My mom looks at me. I shake my head and go to my room. He goes and buys himself a new camera and throws out the old one.
...sigh.

Back in the day... part 2

1998-01-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, in high school, I had a teacher...well, ok, she wasn't actually my teacher, but I spent a lot of time helping her with her computer because she had a mac, and I "knew mac stuff". She had a very, very temperamental mac. For good reason. It was totally ghetto. She had gotten it from a friend or something as a "really good system" and while it *had* been a good system at the time, it was so weird and unconventional and just plain busted that it was horrendous to deal with.

It was a Macintosh IIci. The RAM slots had all of their retaining clips busted so the RAM was held in with a series of rubber bands and scraps of cardboard wedged in between them. So a sudden jolt to the table would often dislodge a piece of RAM, which in-use computers do not like. So you had to sit very still, and use the computer very gingerly. On top of that, it had one of the first high-resolution optical mice, which required a special mirrored mousepad with a micro-grid printed in it. This mousepad was full of scratches and dings which made the mouse quite spastic.
Also, it had a fairly expensive laser printer (LaserMaster, I think was what it was called) which required a special interface card and special drivers that pretty much only worked once you tricked them into doing so. Oh, and they had somehow set up the system to load their fonts fron SyQuest cartridges whenever they needed them. This may not sound like it means much, but it was a Big Deal and Bad Thing considering they would use fonts spanning multiple separate cartridges during a single project, ejecting and inserting them as needed.

Anyway, none of that has to do with data recovery, but it has everything to do with how glitchy the system was.

At some point, all of these crazy things led up to the driver of the hard drive getting corrupted (essentially a small portion of the first part of the drive that loads first in order to access the drive). The machine would immediately boot with a black Sad Mac screen and the death chimes. What was their solution? Well, you see...They'd reach in the computer and unplug the cable from the hard drive, and then turn it on. The, start up the computer from a floppy disk. Then! Plug the hard drive in, inside this currently-running-computer and mount the hard drive with a utility (SCSI Probe).
This was not the right thing to be doing. I got involved because "some programs weren't working right for some reason" and eventually the drive failed to even work with their "workaround".

Yeah, you're booting off of an incredibly old version of the system, off of a floppy. With a possibly trashed hard drive. Geez.
Well, the drive wouldn't mount at all now because of the trashed driver. It was calling itself a "Zacintosh Driver" I finally managed to get SCSI Probe to mount it *just* enough to run Norton Filesaver on it by turning on allllll sorts of options for loading an independent driver without any error correction and such, I can't remember the specific options but it was basically *everything* under the advanced settings.

This also required me using a separate computer to make a boot disk that had system files, Norton, and SCSI Probe on it. And still, I had to go into the settings in Norton and have it "Search for partitions" on the drive to find the drive. Why I had to mount it, well, you see. Norton tries to load the disk's built-in driver which would immediately crash everything.
Oh, and by the way. I only had 44mb SyQuest disks to back up to. I had to restart the computer every once in a while because it would stop recognizing the drives or lock up. It took forever.

Spending hours doing things like this, while the teacher kept the door shut to keep the other students out, is what led to rumors of me having affairs with her (and a couple other teachers). Yes, I had teachers that would always ask for me to come give them computer time, sometimes at home. When did I find out about this well-traveled rumor? Years, years after graduating. Heh. Some friends I had.

Eventually she got a new computer by the way. After helping fix it many times and replacing both the logic board and power supply seperately, it finally died the last death. Needless to say, all the weird peripherals stayed behind with it.

Back in the day...

1998-01-01T13:11:00.000-08:00

I suppose this would be the first heavy-duty, semi-important data recovery I did...sometime in...1998 or so, I think. Did some weekend work for a guy who did some local events (this one in particular was a Renaissance Faire) and just happened to see that he had Macs in his office one day when I was filling out some paperwork. Started chatting with him and before I knew it I was spending more time helping with computer problems than any of the other stuff...which was ok, it was an air-conditioned office and it was off-time from the event so I would have just been hauling something around or that sort of thing.
Eventually something happened and his hard drive stopped working and he came to me asking for help. It was actually relatively simple, it was just a *massively* corrupted directory and I was able to get the majority of his files, complete with file/folder structure and everything, using Data Recovery Toolkit. The only difficulty was that his drive was several times bigger than the one in my computer (at this time I had a 120mb drive so a lot of stuff would have been bigger, but I think his was 1gb or so). Ended up recovering to a Jaz disk for him. Feeling accomplished, I told him I recovered all of his data. He asked me how much I wanted for it, and I just named a figure, which I think was like $100, maybe $200, but I don't remember now. All I know is that he looked surprised as he turned with a big wad of bills and peeled off a few with a smile and thanked me....
...I probably could have asked for more, but I always felt odd trying to come up with prices for what I did...
but still...I kinda wish I had. Turns out the data I recovered was super-important, tax-related stuff and all of the employee and customer info, mailing lists, all that sort of thing...
ah, well.