Course or Data Compass

[dcrecovery]

Hi, I have 3000$ to invest in my HddRecovery Learning, but I don't know if is more important buy Salvation Data Data Compass or do the course of MyHardDriveDied.com, in the course there are many tools for data recovery...

Opinions??

[thatdellguy]

Data Compass is just an imager. I'm not sure how that will start your DR career.

Scotts course; A single 3K course is not going to make you an instant expert. I would invest that money into purchasing broken drives and figuring out why they failed.

[loki]

I think if your starting out in DR (like me)then logical recoveries is a good place to start at + perhaps saving more money to purchase a Deepspar DDI for imaging those hard drives with bad sectors as it would be more financially lucrative & will pay its self off with the extra jobs you will be able to do.
Only then when you have enough experiance should you contemplate venturing into hardware fixes & even then only on old drives to start with to get lots of practice.

Regarding recovery software the list below is a good place to start with:
R-Studio software
Runtime software
Easeus data recovery & partition table doctor
MHDD
Victoria
FTK image
dd_rescue


Loki

[Nick_CT]

I agree with both of those responses. I started off using GetDataBack, then messed around with ddrescue, then started repairing PCBs, then got PC3K and moved my way up from there. Start small.

[619beave]

I would also invest in a good Hex Editor like Winhex. There is a lot you can fix with a hex editor in 5 or 10 minutes that would take hours to do with Conventional recovery software.

[poehere]

I think that buying old HDD and practicing on them is the way to go. Also you can learn a lot if you just look through Intenet and start to study file structure and learn hex and do like one said about win hex. I would save your money on the course that Scott is offering and spend it on research with old drives. Refurbishing old drives will give you a very good idea on how this all works and give you a lot of advantages with it comes to fixing other drives that clients bring in. I know it is not the same but you will learn a lot and it will give you a lot of practice doing this one.

[DrFaustus]

I took Scott's course, & I'm not gonna jump into... you have to buy it. if you can save your money & get a Deepspar disk imager .. simple to use & highly effective. & like poehere said, get some broken drives & figure out whats wrong with them to fix them... you will be surprise on how much you can do, once you get a failing drive into good running order drive.... problematic motors, bad sectors ,,, even some head diagnostics. trust me get a deepspar... & it almost will run it self. i highly recommend it for simplicity sake. i make extra simple money just cloning drives for other techs. & let them do the logical. the primary goal of pysical data recovery ,is get the bad drive running enough to get the sectors off, & a good Imager will do that..... i usually ask does the Bios recognize the drive, yes.. then i know its just a matter of cloning the drive or cleaning the board with contact cleaner....(usually)

oh yeah the tools that come with the course are pretty cool also, but once yo get deep into this, the next phase i recoment a write blocker, or some linux r/o distros. don't wan to screw aup yuor slvaged copy of a failed drive.