New member seeks guidance for embarking beyond software only

[inflex]

Hello all,

First up, I'm an electronics engineer, done a lot of designing, manufacturing, repairs over the years ( including quite fine SMD work ), I'm also a programmer and I've been servicing computers for over 25 years and have no problems with Unix or Windows systems. In the last 18 months I've shifted my business back to focusing more on repairs and recovery.

More and more I'm finding I have clients with drives that I can't recover simply with tools like ddrescue / testdisk / photorec [ I prefer to operate in Linux for data recovery ] and general good-luck using periodic drive cycling hoping that "this time" it'll initialise. I'm getting drives with click death, spin up/down failures and various noises galore. So, I'm trying to find out what more I need to attain in order to embark on taking that next step to get to the next level of data recovery. Until now I've been redirecting clients that fall beyond the current repair options over to data-recovery centres located about 1200km from here. It'd be nice for client sanity and my own income to get a bit more of that work to stay in house.

I'm considering investing in some sort of very small clean room or enclosure, though that might be more like 2-steps ahead of where I am now.

I've looked at the PC-3000 system, though the EE in me sees what is essentially a kit of adapters to talk serial to the hard drives and of course the drive interface itself (SATA), is PC-3000 really needed if I already have all the gear here in a different form?

Happy to listen to those with experience on this matter so that I don't go wandering off in to too many tar pits.

Regards.

[inflex]

After doing more reading ( quite a lot more ). I think I'm going to just start out with creating the serial interfaces for the drives and work my way through the various manufactuer command sets incrementally. I see tools like PC3K offer a fair bit on the software side of things in addition to the hardware, however at this point I'll abstain in investing until I have a few more walks around the block.

Looks like it's going to be an extensive and long process to acquire sufficient experience, but I'm looking forward to that.

[fzabkar]

Your starting point in terms of knowledge and experience is far ahead of most people who embark on a data recovery career. ISTM that your learning curve will be a lot less steep than most. Best of luck in your endeavours.

[inflex]

Thanks fzabkar. I see you're also in Australia, nice to see fellow country dwellers. I'm up in the North QLD inland region, a lot of rural clients. Do you have any recommendations of your own for domestic clean-room recovery services that you've found to be proficcient?

I'll be working on my serial interfaces today/tomorrow, as I already have a few units bought in from the weekend ( including a nice dropped 2TB Seagate external enclosure, though I daresay that'll require some sort of physical fixing beyond my facilities.

[fzabkar]

I have experience in electronics, but I'm not a data recovery professional. Sorry.

That said, your 2TB problem sounds like it may be stiction, in which case most data recovery shops should be able to handle it.

[inflex]

Thanks for that.

I keep hoping that the faults on the drives will be controller-board based, and thus within my current skillset, but life it seems has other ideas *laugh*.

Curious, given that you're in to electronics ( as opposed to being a "DR Pro" ), you've got an impressive post count. What sort of work do you mostly find youself doing?

I'll post up a couple of the drive-failure cases in a few days once I've sorted out everything here ready to ask questions that hopefully aren't too obvious/stupid.