Data Recovery

June 06, 2003
Privet Desc

Hard drives fail all the time. Eventually your hard drive will fail and your data will no longer be available. Ron Austin of Action Front Data Recovery Labs joins the geeks for a discussion on how data can be recovered from "dead" hard drives.

  [ Audio 9.4 MB mp3 ]

Data Recovery is the process of getting data off of a hard drive or some other storage media when the media has become unavailable. It is essential that you do regular backups of your data, because your media will eventually fail.

Ron Austin

 Ron Austin

Vice Presedent of Marketing and Business Development at Action Front Data Recovery Labs, Ron Austin holds a BA in Computer Science from York University and graduated with distinction. Ron began his IT career as a programmer/analyst then moved into sales, marketing and eventually general management gaining many years experience at the senior executive level of technology companies including serving as President & CEO of Globelle Corporation before it was sold to Tech Data Corporation.

Ron has written two Data Emergency Guides that tell you what to do and what NOT to do when you experiance data problems.

The News

Every week we cover a bit of the Geek news.

  • Sean- Video Game Ban lifted

  • John- BugBear Virus

  • Miles- Microsoft patches to be better

  • Dedi- Apple, Indeependint Music

  • Miles- Real Life - counter strike

  • Dedi- Final Cut Pro Version 4

  • Lyle- Apple Dropes Powerbook prices in a move to increase their laptop business.

  • Sean- Small Hard Drives

Calls and Emails

Jeffery Los Gatos

1) BugBear Virus Patch Clarification

What is the Windows Update to Patch "BugBear Virus" volnurability?

MS01-027 Patch

To protect your self from this new virus go to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-027, read the bulletin and install the patch. You need this patch if you are running Windows with Internet Explorer 5.01 and 5.5.

2) Hard Drives as Back Up

Jeffery recomended using a second harddrive as a backup. The guest and the Geeks agreed, but exterimaly important documents should be backed up and taken to a second phisical location.

Ted Corralitos

Wipe a Drive?

Ted Emailed us and asked:

Hi Guys, It's Ted from Corralitos again, can't get to a phone right now...

I am wondering if I do something like

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

and write NULLs to my hard drive, say just one pass... Is it possible to recover the data I just "wiped"?

Sorta...

Ron sais no, but Miles recomends writing random data, not just nulls. Also two or more passes, for the paranoid, is helpful.

Zoe Monterey

Reformat Loss

Can you recover data from a reformated hard drive?

Low vs High Level Format

You can recover from a high-level format (quick pass), but not from the, less common, low-level platform.