Hard drive crash? Fear not

By Kim Komando

Let's start with this scenario: You just spent weeks creating and editing a complicated document. Your meeting with a big client is approaching. Suddenly, your computer screen is blue and filled with strange characters.

Sound familiar? The hard drive has died, taking your presentation with it. You don't have a backup. It's too early for suicide, but your life has suddenly gotten tougher.

When it comes to your computer, the hard drive is the weak link. It has a read-write head that flies just above the platters on which data is saved. The gap between the head and the platters is microscopic. If the head hits a platter, the game is up.

Actually, "if" is the wrong word. Sooner or later, you will face this situation. Best to prepare for it now!

I know, because it has happened in my office twice in the last year. After the first incident, I toughened up on backups. But when the second occurred, we discovered that our backup was inadequate. Key files had not been backed up. Sigh!

That left us with a choice: Do we fix the hard drive ourselves? Or do we farm it out? Repairing it ourselves probably would cost less than $100. Farming it out would tally thousands.

That sounds like an easy choice. But the hard drive contained a Christmas show we produced jointly with Mannheim Steamroller. We were on a deadline to distribute it to 150 radio stations. Christmas is inflexible; it always comes on Dec. 25. Our deadline was inflexible, too. The data had to be recovered, soon.

Nonetheless, we first tried to:

Fix it ourselves. We installed the damaged hard drive in a spare machine as the secondary drive. On the primary drive, we installed a program to rescue the data. (There are a number of such programs on the Web.) We fired it up.

About 24 hours later, we discovered the program had made some slight progress. And every day, it made a little more. Unfortunately, this was a huge hard drive.

Before long, we came to the conclusion that the in-house repair wouldn't work. Time was slipping. We needed to rescue this data. So, we bit the bullet and decided to:

Farm it out. There is no shortage of companies that claim to handle these jobs. Just check the Yellow Pages. However, many do not actually do the work. Rather, they contract with specialists. Others do this work on the side.

I didn't want to pay for a local middleman. This was going to be costly enough, as it was. And I wanted professionals with whom I was comfortable. So we started looking online. We found a number, and settled on Data Recovery Systems in California.

(I wanted to do an advertising trade-out, rather than pay cash. Data Recovery Systems was willing to do that. The value of its work was about $6,000, including $2,000 for the rush job.)

To make a long story short, the California company found physical damage on the hard drive. There was no way we could have recovered it. Professional work doesn't come cheap. But losing that data was unthinkable.

You can expect to face this issue, sooner or later. Here are a couple more things to ponder:

When in doubt, send it out. If the value is in the data, send the drive out for recovery. Valuable time can be wasted trying to fix the problem yourself.

The software we tried addresses logical-disk errors. Logical failures refer to invalid or corrupt files systems, partition or boot sector problems, or files that were deleted unintentionally.

Unfortunately, we had a physical problem. Parts had to be replaced. The drive had to be dismantled in a clean room environment. This is a delicate operation and requires special equipment.

I have a great IT guy. But he could not have handled this. And the program we tried would not have worked.

In our case, we were lucky we didn't damage the drive further. When such a failure occurs, it is difficult to understand. I'm more cost-conscious than most people. But if data is critical, don't take chances with it.

Logical failures are less expensive to correct. Data Recovery Systems charges $300 to $1,000 to fix logical disk errors.

If you find yourself in a jam similar to mine, I'd turn to the Internet. A number of companies do rescue work.

One of my colleagues strongly recommends Ontrack Data Recovery. He has successfully used its remote data recovery service. Vogon Data Recovery also comes highly recommended.

Test your backup plan. Backups are obviously critical. A good backup would have saved me a lot of money and worry.

You need to really think through your back-up plan. If possible, test it to be sure it actually works. I have heard lots of stories about backups that weren't there when they were needed.

The backup program included in Microsoft Windows XP works well. I use it in the office and at home. Automatic backups are easy to schedule. I wrote an earlier column on backups that you may find helpful.

Another option is SyncToy, a free program from Microsoft.