Your operating procedure after head swaps

[Alexii]

Heya all. I am curious , say you get a case with damaged heads. What is the standard operating procedure for you after the swap. My boss has a tendency to go for specified user data through data extractor pointing out that imaging entire drive is not needed. I stay in defense of DDIing the drive since it is sequential and a lot less movement the heads have to do. What about you ?
Thx.

[HDD Spaz]

sequential recovery of critical data : )

Both methods have pros and cons, if you try image sequentially you may encounter bad area, killing new heads, before good data is recovered, or if you try to recover data direct, again same problem can occur and more chance of heads dieing by sweeping all over the platter.

[jono-ats]

It depends upon the OS to some extent. You can't image data by file on file systems that aren't supported . . .

I think we tend to try to image the drive unless sector damage is too severe, in which case we go for image-by-file (if supported). But procedures depend upon the circumstances.

[N.C.]

First you should find damages on the platter BEFORE assemble new heads, and after you have the needed information + readed out the MBR, some MFT or FAT or what the case has, you should decide on best methode wich have less risk for heads.

If somebody use only one methode all the time, this is bad idea.

Cases are different.

Janos

[N.C.]

I forget to add, i am totally agree with HDD Spaz, the best if the FS is good and supported, because you can do both in one time with DE.

[Alexii]

just did a swap on a wd3200bekt-75ka9t0 drive was droped. Boss went with DE , started good but went downhill. A good 20 percent of the docs needed reported some bads during the recovery and didnt want to open normally. So i did it my way =) DDI with folder mask of the user name and file mask of the docs. Clean 99.9 image. DDI is better in this sittuations IMO since it has more flexible algorithms to deal with bads and timeouts. Plus i consider it a big factor the fact that the heads dont fly abck and forth that much.

About the platter inspection for damage - i wish i could =) But we are not that advanced. So unless the damage is top side - not much i can do. We outsource 99.9 percent of platter swap jobs. The 0.1 that we do are 40 and 60 gig 2.5 Toshibas with the bearing issues =) They are single platter and VERY tolerant =)) Havent screwed up a single one.

[HDD Spaz]

I believe DE can do everything DDI can do and more. If you know how to use it correctly its the most powerful tool available to buy in my opinion.

[Alexii]

Actually , just yesterday before closing got a momentus .6 320 gig. Ppl say lost photos , videos. DE didnt see MFT. DDI did... Maybe i need to read up some more on DE.

[pcimage]

For me it very much on what the client wants.

With some clients they are able to say what they want (e.g. "My Photos", "MS Money Accounts") and then we use DE to image sectors pertaining to those folders using the "map of folder" then imaging sequentially to avoid unnecessary head movement. Once we have those folders, we then proceed to attempt the complete image with DDI.

But more often than not, no matter how many times you ask them, they just say "I want everything" so we have not choice but to attempt the whole clone with DDI (or sometimes DE if it seems to be working better, or if it's a Samsung that needs head-by-head cloning)

Also on some occasions with WD hot-swaps when the drive errors, all it needs is a recalibration to get it going again and a soft-reset takes AGES. DE allows this, but at present DDI does not. I have requested this feature from Deepspar and they are going to implement it in the next release, so they tell me.

So, in a nutshell it's very much a "case by case" analysis.

[mydata.pl]

The 0.1 that we do are 40 and 60 gig 2.5 Toshibas with the bearing issues =) They are single platter and VERY tolerant =))

Toshibas are tolerant, that is true. But in most cases there is no need for platters swap when dealing with bearing issues in toshibas. Just fix the bearing.

[Corsari]

DDI I know what is it,

can you kindly let me understand what DE is?

Thank you

C.

[pclab]

Hi

DE is Ace Lab Data Extractor.
You can see more about it here: http://www.acelaboratory.com/dataextractor.php

[Corsari]

One kind curiosity about head swap,

Said first that clean room is needed and a lot of experience too,

when you find the exact model donor and you swap heads, is the hardware job finished?

I mean, what happen at that point? The drive is closed and the above tools DE/DDI are enough to start cloning/recovery the drive?
I ask this because I understood that donor heads working on the drive under recovery, are pretty unstable and a lot of bad sectors are rising.

Or, i.e., PC3K is needed to adjust/input/copy some SA files?
I'm wondering if this is a must to make the donor heads working properly on the other drive

I understand the power of PC3000 but I'm not able to figure out on 100 hdds failure cases, how many may be recovered by PC3K without opening the drive. About heads instability, I perceive that DDI concept would help a lot with them.

Thank you for all your kind replies and thank you for any further. I know the theory and the tools, but I don't have enough items/time/money/cases to enter in this part of the DR world, I mean the hard-hdd-recovery, while RAID data recovery and NAS data recovery is done in my shop in Italy (not outsourced, I mean).