Gadgetory

deep Spahr located in Ottawa Ontario is a data recovery company but not in the way that you might think like you can't just drop in with your dead hard drive and ask them to fix it for you their business is developing the software hardware and the techniques that are used by everyone from mom-and-pop shop technicians to huge data recovery houses right on the other side of this wall is actually the classroom that they use to Train police and other government agencies on data recovery so they sponsored our trip out here to do two things one to show consumers how to save money on data recovery service and number two to show repair shops how they can dramatically improve their chances of recovery for their customers scenario 1 of hard drive failure is clicking and clacking noises sometimes without being detected by the system okay this happens it's probably a physical problem so if the data is important don't do anything unplug your drive and send it to a pro immediately or your chances of a successful recovery will be dramatically lower or possibly even zero a pro is going to use tools like these and a laminar flow workstation like this one or even a full-on cleanroom like the one that I checked out over at Dr savers to physically swap components into the failed drive from donor drives sometimes this needs to be done multiple times in cases where one bad part is causing the other ones to fail prematurely they'll also use professional tools from companies like deep spark so I didn't know it but I was actually using disk imager for when I performed my own head swap in that video scenario number 2 is an electronics problem maybe a broken SATA connector or a burned chip on the PCB could be causing the drive to not be detected by your system the most common symptom here is total silence now sometimes you will need to call a pro for this and if the data is mission-critical you should always call a pro but for waste to have rather than need to have data this type of failure actually exposes the platters of the drive and therefore the data to much less risk so in some cases you can attempt a home repair if you're handy with a soldering iron now deep spar had this whole demo plan for me the the cBS chip actually handles overcurrent protection for the drive and can fail due to an external issue so just removing it from the PCB can possibly brick the drive because you're removing the overcurrent protection but in many cases it can allow the data to be recovered if it's hooked up to a known good system and power source but we are throwing that demo out the window because I brought these far an unexpected present this is Terrence personal dead hard drive that failed when we hooked it up to a faulty power supply cable while he and I were at the office late upgrading his system now he would likely be quoted three to five hundred US dollars minimum to fix this and since he's Terran and he doesn't remember exactly what's on it he's not gonna pay that much to get it back so we're gonna see how we do with a DIY grade repair Derek you ready so what we're gonna do first is we're gonna verify the diagnosis now I'm already pretty sure that we're gonna power up this drive and we're gonna hear a whole lot of nothing so that means there's a good chance that this is an electronics problem okay so we power down now unfortunately swapping out a PCB on a drive isn't as simple as going to the hard drive PCB store and buying one yeah if only life were that easy right look at him he's defeated he's defeated so eBay and Craigslist are your friends now fortunately in Tara's case he already had a donor drive that looks like it's gonna be suitable so there's a couple things to watch for you need the drive model to be the same so not just this drive model but also this model number right here so these look good and you even need the PCB revision to be the same now these two are a slightly different color here but that's not important what matters is that they're both revision a and they both have exactly the same model so these should theoretically be suitable okay now we're at the point where most amateurs would screw up this kind of a recovery they'd go okay well now we take the good PCB put it on the bad Drive and bippity Boppity off to the races right wrong data density on modern drives is so high that the manufacturing tolerances are nowhere near good enough that every drive will just work out of the factory so they have to build in compensation and calibration that is unique to your individual drive it's usually stored on a little 8 pin ROM chip that looks like this and that specialized data has to be brought over so want to show us how to desolder and resolder a ROM chip all right let's do it let's not screw these up which ones which D on this one okay we're good there's a pro tip right there my friends better to market first now we're ready to put the PCB back on and we can go test it right yeah all right here goes nothing it's not picking up do you want to have a look at it okay so unfortunately sometimes when you hook up to a bad power source it kills more than one thing so we fixed our PCB problem but we're still getting this zero capacity nonsense here and we're getting kind of like a chirping noise and Jarek like drive whispered with the horse whisperer for hard drives over here and told me that what he thinks is that it's the preamplifier chip that right so that's a component of the drive head which means that we actually need to dig a little deeper on this thing we're gonna take it over to the landowner flow workstation and tear it apart so what this station does is it uses a really thick filter here to pull all the dust out of the air and then you've got this constant flow of clean air so that none of the contaminated air around us can get into the drive that's really important with how close the head is to the platter even the smallest speck of dust could cause catastrophic damage to the platter as it's flying over it so now we're swapping the known good heads from the working drive into our bad drive and actually now that I come to think of it by known-good I mean I have no idea I have not actually tested this drive presumably Tarun checked it before he gave it to me if it helps it all for the tension of this situation I still don't know that this will actually work the way we want I mean we could have screwed something up right what's your confidence level right now that's not bad alright let's go give it a shot so this is it moment of truth now I'm not superstitious but I'm gonna cross my fingers I'm not gonna knock on wood though cuz then we might like bump the dress hey no you think we're gonna get it now that's actually a really important point just because we are able to read data off of this drive does not mean that teryn can take it pop it back in a system and start using it again this is still a dead drive so what we're doing right now is we're pulling a bit 4-bit copy of all of the data off and we're putting it on to a new one we are imaging the drive a 97 megabytes a second sorry okay so I have to do this for another six hours scenario number three is a firmware problem now for unusual issues deep knowledge of hard drive firmware design and a professional tool like a PC 3000 is necessary but the fees that you can expect to pay to someone who can interpret this matrix level stuff right here would be anywhere from $500 to easily thousands of dollars depending on the complexity of the problem the good news is that many common firmware issues can actually be solved with pretty much a button press and that is where deep sparse tool the rapid par wow this is taking a really long time to detect drive still works fine oh here we go it's um a second those ages yeah we've got a petition it's not three partitions off of it already though and then we're just waiting on the dishes to loading what a frustrating and tedious line of work but you get to deliver people their data back right but but someone gets their data back there we go okay so now then we're good it's just that every time we have to plug in this drive it takes a lot of time to detect it so wait so everything is slow like this funny story I was actually here two weeks ago and but we lost part of the data from that shoot last time we were able to show that the data was transferring at such a speed that it would take infinitely long to get it off meaning that the drive would be guaranteed to be dead by the time we actually managed to recover anything from it but it's going even slower why it's just getting bogged down doing something that it's not supposed to be doing so instead of giving us the data it's just and this is completely custom hardware and software is that right correct who you build everything from this from scratch it's made of Canada the reason is that off-the-shelf operating systems make certain assumptions about the hardware namely that it works so as soon as the hardware doesn't work it starts running into issues and that's why any software product is going to get stymied by certain drive malfunctions whereas when you build your own thing from the ground up that expects problems well you can have a different experience so what Serge is doing right now in their software is he's running a diagnostic test on the drive to determine what exactly the firmware problem is so this process takes a couple of minutes and what it's doing is it's going through and it's finding any discrepancies and the firmware of this drive compared to what's supposed to be there and then it's overriding them and that doesn't make it so the drive loses any data no no okay so now all that's left is power down the drive touch interface nice touch then theoretically we pop this guy back into our drive dock here and now oh I thought I heard sorry okay power on the drive Hey there it is oh that's way faster of course though the acid test is a file copy can we get data off of this drive now now that discovery process is going faster hey there we go this is much better awesome here we go there we go fantastic so with the rapid bar we went from not being able to copy the data at any kind of reasonable speed to now we are copying all the data off this drive now one of these guys does cost about $2,000 so end-users aren't expected to buy one but since it's so simple to use if you the end-user can find a shop that has one you should expect to pay about 300 bucks for a recovery that it can handle so I mean maybe that's still not worth it for photos of that night of binge drinking or whatever but if your tax records and your will are on your hard drive it's worth considering in scenario number four we're gonna see another solution that you can actually try at home and this time without any specialized tools all we need is a USB Drive doc our drive and a computer so this is an example of logical corruption we're gonna go ahead and plug in our drive and power it on and you're gonna see something that you might have seen before so this can be caused by accidental formatting viruses or Windows errors see this you need to format the disk and drive D but hold on a second I had data on this okay step number one don't click format then we're gonna use a software called our studio but there are actually free options out there that are somewhat similar we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna click on our drive here we're gonna double click empty space and if it's not actually a hardware issue da-da-da-da-dah so no bad sectors and look at this here's all our files they are ready for recovery fantastic this type of software can also help us diagnose scenario number five so the thing is is that unless you drop it or something a hard drive doesn't generally go from working perfectly to completely dead in an instant-read instability almost always comes first and these types of drives these mostly dead drives that haven't fully failed yet make up the majority of cases that get sent in for data recovery the symptoms of these drives can include not being detected in the BIOS preventing the computer from booting spitting out random errors well just getting so slow that you can't do anything with them anymore you shouldn't have any noticeable knocking or clicking yet and that exactly the situation so we're gonna fire up our studio here and oh that's interesting our computer is completely frozen up one of these partitions has shown up but this one's just not populated here's a little Windows hack that you might be able to use to get access to a drive like this all you need to do is start up the command prompt as an administrator start up Windows is built-in partition tool oh I got a right the computer's completely locked up I got a power down this Drive first there we go now ever thing seen how everything comes back then we just need to run a couple of commands auto mount disabled and auto mount scrub with our tweak what's gonna happen here is that Windows isn't going to try to load a drive letter and that's actually a good thing because it can hang the entire operating system while Windows tries to mount the file system and it will try and then timeout in the know it'll restart and do it forever doing more damage to what is already a damaged drive in the first place so now that we've done this we can open up Disk Management and boom there it is there's our 300 gig drive and we can actually launch our our Studio software now because the system isn't completely locked up in cases where the drive doesn't have a ton of bad sectors we actually can attempt a recovery that's looking for oh this is taking longer than it should so this is the point where as a data recovery technician your gut feeling should be to stop what you're doing because we're only 17 percent of the way through and this drive has many bad sectors which are taking anywhere from one to three minutes to detect each time now the problem here is that this is a typical software behavior where the drive encounters are read error and it just keeps trying and keeps trying to keep trying this puts a lot of strain on the drive and can cause it to fail right in the middle of this type of recovery attempt so we're gonna switch over to the rapid bar and about that method so all we're gonna do is plug our drive in here go ahead and power it up and then there are a couple of things that might make us think that this the Rapids bar is going to work better than a standard computer for one thing if it encounters a bad sector instead of Aria tempting Andrea tempting wearing out the drive it will actually cut off its reattempt after a couple of hundred milliseconds this dramatically reduces the stress on the drive for another it actually borrows a lot of DNA from their higher-end products of this is the disk imager so when we set our source drive parameters here we select the brand and the interface and what it's doing is it's actually taking information about the behavior of our drive as it scans it and it's uploading it to deep spar servers where it compares it against the database their server then sends our rapid bar some recommendations for how to deal with it to help accelerate the recovery pretty cool right so we can double click partition one here and boom we're running a scan so you can see here we already hit one of those bad sectors but instead of trying for two minutes it's only gonna try for a couple of seconds before it moves on now we're never gonna get back any data that was on those sectors but at least we can get back whatever is on either side so check this out we didn't get everything you can see there's some corrupted stuff here but even though this drive had hundreds of bad sectors instead of taking two minutes every time it hit a bad sector this whole scan only took us about seven minutes much less wear and tear and there's some other cool stuff too for this trick we need a drive that is in much worse condition let's go ahead and power this on that's the hard drive that's less fine that's not fine at all yeah yeah turn it off but the rapid bar has another borrowed trick up its sleeve so all we got to do is plug this in but we're not gonna power the drive on right away because we don't want it to start thrashing instead we're gonna let the software interface power on the drive and then start eating commands to it immediately so that it doesn't get a chance to try to click itself to death here so it's powering it on and then hopefully we're not gonna hear a ton of clicking cuz that would mean the potential for our dead head to cause our other head to fail that's something that's really common once you've got one head gone the other ones tend to follow soon smart failed ok that makes sense now in a moment here it's gonna start checking the heads and media we're probably gonna hear a couple of clicks here because you can't check if the head works without trying to move it not good Diagnostics are done now so 19% of our tested sectors do contain data there's something to recover here as we expected one of our three heads is that 46% health now we're not getting back anything that's on that platter with the bad head unless we do a head swap and put a new head in the drive so if this stuff isn't mission-critical what we're gonna do is we're gonna build a head nap here then we're gonna disable that head and see how much of the data we can pull off all we got to do is click this skip anything on head one click apply and now we're getting a new sector map by heads comes our files and directories and boom there it is file tree baby love it and through all this accessing you don't hear any clicks anymore because that head has been parked as long as we're using the rapid fire so this thing is really cool but to be clear the rapid fire is also not magic so of the jobs that come into your shop some of them are gonna be solvable with software and then of the ones that remain about half of them can be dealt with with the Rapids bar and then the other half are still gonna have to be outsourced to a professional that's armed with more powerful tools and probably a clean room so disk imager for along with the software that accompanies it allows very fine control of things like the reattempt threshold it has a ton of configuration knobs that a professional can tune and can be used to work on drives that the Rapids bar can't even interface with yet like for example a PCI Express nvme SSD the Rapids Bar can handle a regular SATA SSD which by the way can have bad sectors as well so that's pretty much it so hopefully whether you're an IT manager or you run your own shop or you're just an end-user you've gained some knowledge about the data recovery business and how it works behind the scenes now of course deep spark just want to throw this in deeps for our values your business but any video about data recovery would be incomplete without a reminder that in a perfect world you wouldn't need it please backup your data because the deeps bar guys would love nothing more than to live in a world where no one loses their data and they can just sit on a beach somewhere drinking cocktails instead of hanging around with me all day so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff that we featured in the video description this would be a great addition to any tech shop out there while you guys are at it we've got our merch store listed in the video description as well and a link to our community forum which you should totally join you look very satisfied right now yes this Drive is broken exactly the way I wanted it to be for this demo