Should I ‘DIY’ a hard disk drive data recovery?
It has become a modern tradition in the UK that the Easter and Whitsun/Spring bank holidays are a time for ‘DIY’ activities around the home. Today, after the bank holiday, CDR has received a number of enquiries from individuals, whom, with perhaps more time and curiosity than the working week typically allows, decided to perform DIY data recovery on their bank holiday.
DIY data recovery cannot necessarily be reversed
In your home, if you over paint you wood-work, or drill too big a hole in the wall, then usually your DIY mess can be sorted out by a professional tradesman quite easily. Reversing a botched DIY data recovery is not so easy. Moreover, it is often the case that data can be made completely unrecoverable, and at the very least the data recovery process is made more challenging for the professional, and consequently more expensive for the customer.
Damage to PCB due to USB connector being broken off, and then the owner’s DIY data recovery attempt.
On the bank holiday, we were contacted by a man who had snapped off the USB connector of his external portable Toshiba HDD. The USB connector was integrated into the main PCB, and it is not possible to directly swap over the PCB with that of another PCB as there is unique adaptive/firmware data on a Toshiba HDD’s PCB. However, a professional data recovery company would expect to make a full recovery. After asking him a series of questions I found out that the owner of the HDD had decided to open up the HDD and expose the platters (risking contamination), and then removed each of the internal components, including separating the two platters, and removal of the head assembly. Quite how he thought this would help the recovery of the HDD after a failed printed circuit board remains a mystery to us.
Unrecoverable data
In this case, it was necessary to be despairingly honest with the potential customer. It was explained to him, that there was a very high likelihood that his data could now no longer be recovered due to physical damage and contamination of the platters, and that he had misaligned the platters.
In short, on your bank holiday, please stick to doing DIY on your home or garden. If you require data recovery please contact us, we can still help, even on a bank holiday.