You either don't read my posts or understand them. My posts on the DC unit are from other members at the SD forum. I don't own the product.

PS: "A fool and his money are soon parted"

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Lol ,
i Love The quote

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Hi
I am a new customer to Salvation Data. I bought the DataCompass and all the Doctors.

[My background - Computer Techi all my life; slept computers, ate computers, puke computers
- I studied programming at Uni and today I am a senior Technician and systems administrator for a small company (never touched data recovery because of all the secrecy and rumours behind it..)

One day i got bored and started seraching data recovery tools, found this SalvationData page and showed the boss and he wasnt interested in purchasing this stuff. So I did

I was under the impression that this tool is amazing and you connect your hdd and press a button and its fixed... so wrong.. (but like a good sales man he convinced me. and i bought)
Using the SD forums and getting to know the SD team better I realised I got sucked into a black hole. I got into something new and I love it. ( I admit the support is not great - I think its because of the communication barrier - they tend to misunderstand the question and do something completely different) Unfortunately I lost a drive because the support guy flashed my drive to FIX it- but I needed the data recovering .. hehe - any way; data lost and 1 good drive later.. i stopped using SD forums and limited support from them.

I have no offense to SD - I am actually gratefull i could get an reasonably affordable (yet super overpriced USB-to-IDE interface with dedicated power and ATA control) from a .net app in Windows on my USB with no other fancy stuff. It opened a new door for me and I am cramming allot of new info into my brain... (Thanks to all your guys post here on HDD GURU you really are Gurus)

I bought this February 2010. I have already made reasonable amount back in profit from just comming home after 18.00 and messing about with forums and blowing innocent HDD's up

I like DataCompass because-
- I have recvoered ALL hard drives with bad sectors (where windows hangs and you cannot press anything) with a data recovery rate of %95 (and my system did not hang once) (set retries to 0, soft reset quick, hard reset on 'hang', skip known bads, skip file if known bad)
-First time ever i recovered a partition AFTER it was formatted fully intact - I used EasyRecvory, RecoverMyfiles, NTFS Restore (no hope) this copied as if the format never happened in full UDMA and read ahead mode at ~35mb/s on usb to another USB
-First time ever i recovered the partition fully from one of these hard drives that just go RAW for no reason.
- Recovered data of camcorder that was fomrmatted acidentaly , and Macintosh HDD
- Have not done this yet - but it comes in a great case and i can go directly to client to do to a recovery using my laptop.

What i don't like
-Software crashes and you cant do anything -start from step one
-Several different adaptors, cables galore- especailly if you use SD
-Support - For somebody who had no idea on how to perform any sort of recovery - the user guides and manually must be translated in google translator and the movies are 'no comment' (like i mentioned above)
-Did I mention that the software crashes...(from a programmers point of view I can understand this, especially in software that is evolving daily)

I see HDDPro (thatdellguy) man posting allot here (dissing SD) and I understand what you are trying to say. Leave this stuff to the professionals like your self. You have labs, years of knowledge, trained people and yet you still have time to contribute to this forum - I admire that. Because of the years I fixed pc's and all sorts of electronics i never- not once- ever never ever posted on a forum how to fix a problem because i thought to my self 'oh my god - just go to a professional you *&£^'

never say never , eh...

I have opened pandoras box by purchasing DataCompass - and thatdellguy + other pro recovery guys - i look up to you guys and i hope with allot of hard work i will get somewhere with all this mess i got my self into hehehe

Conclusion:
DataCompass does work - but im only comparing to what i COULD NOT DO before.. to what i can do now.

HD Doctors - especially seagate with terminal/ rom and all that; is killing my HDD's left and right - luckily i got allot of bad sector HDD I can donate to my research.
I have not yet restored 1 drive using HD Doctors(mostly because im a noob)


Hope that my post will shed some light on SalvationData and their tools from some fresh un-tainted and unbaised person(im no hdd guru though)

Thanks Guys
and b e gentle

_________________
It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
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To repair a drive before recovery of data for a nOOb: use the case-studies on the SD-forums.

If there is no matching case-study, most of the time you will find it somewhere else in the forum. If you can describe the problem in details, just mail that to SD-support and they might have it themself. They will mail it to you.

BUT be 100% sure the problem is what they describe in the study, else you will destroy the data. 100% sure of that! It is easy to destroy drives with the HD-Doctors (as you know by now).

Do you customers know you are wrecking their chances of seeing their data again? Should be ashamed of yourself!

Now this is professional Data Recovery at its best courtesty of SD

Someone lent me their Data Compass to play with. I've had it here for almost two months. I don't dare use it on live projects until I've completed the project with tried and true methods. I've only tested the DC with complicated projects that require significant tweaking with DDI or DE in order to mirror. In every case, it hasn't been able to recover anything useful...and it takes forever to make that determination.

Problems it has:
- very slow (like UDMA mode makes a difference when connected to a USB cable)
- when a task is running, it basically locks the program and you have to wait, sometimes hours, before it completes the task and responds again
- you really can't see what is going on and determine if you should wait the multiple hours for the process to complete
- support in North America is non existant

I've disconnect it and the disk doctors and the SD Flash and they all sit on a shelf, collecting dust. I'm sure good intentions are there, but they have a long way to go before these products can be taken seriously on the data recovery market. I do, however, like their bench for head and platter removal.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

i looked into the purchase of this unit but not heard anything good at all.

plastic box nothing that says wow for your money.


so i went and purchase the atola imager system which does the same but faster.
the build on this unit is is top notch.


your software could be crashing if your using a newer os system

window xp should run fine no problems.

dont have any anti virus programs running when your doing recovery
this can screw it up

No it does not work this way. The problem is the documentation supplied with these tools is bad. New noobs confuse the fact that this tool can be used to fix FW, refurbish HDD, and a lot of other features. If you are killing your drives as you say the problem is in what you are trying to do with them. You do not understand how to determine your problems in them at all.

Yes language can be a problems in all of this too. When you contact you have to know excatally what is wrong with your drive, tell them what you are doing, Very short they have a hard time to read a lot. Keep it very short.

Also on DC the major problem on this is the limit on cloning of large HDD. On larger drives the program will hang on you. This is a problems on this one. If drives stayed under 400GB then this would be fine considering this is not the case in todays market this is a problem on this one.

Considering you have a lot of HDD laying around it is possible you can play around with these tools and you might find some sucess. But before all this you need to learn about what the SA is, how a drive works, and many other things first. Start with one drive family and keep at it until you can figure it out and you got it down. Learn all you can on one drive family and then move onto another. You might destroy some drives when playing around but never do this one a drive you need data on. You some of your drives you have thrown in a box for recycle.

There is a new manual on forum for DC that has a lot of details in this book and this one should help you out on this tool more. For other tools no help the books are bad and not a lot of help at all. thatdellguy is right on some of the functions it is hit and wonder what they do. The functions are not explained well and not documentated so you know what to do with them at all. . For now you have to have an old drive and do this one with to find out what it really does. Newer documentation will come only for a price on this one cause it has to be written from the tool by someone who works in this field and has the time to tear apart this tool and tell you how it works. This for sure will not be free considering the amount of time it takes to do this one.

Do not relay on Internet to find your answers. R & D is your only way to do this one and it is a long process and can take a lot of time if not years to find your way to what you want to do.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

but the data compass can only repair firmware if you have the wd doctor setup

if im correct ????????

Infact DC was intended (according to advertisements of SD) to retrieve data from drives
which cannot be accdessed any more on pc.

And I confirm that this worked and still works sometimes on hdd smaller than 500GB.

At a specific time SD started to promote the unit also to be for imaging - but the speed
over USB is limited - allthough SD even increased the performance with the last updates.

The main drawback is its limit to work with drives up to 500GB only and not over.

DC never was advertised to repair FW - SD updated the tool some time ago to cooperate
with the HD Doctor tools.

+++

No you are not correct. The DC is a stand alone unit used for imaging and cloning and has a shadow disk feature to this tool. You can depop heads, clone forward, backwards, and do a partition and raw recovery inside of this tool.

The DC can interface with all the HD Doctor suite but does not need them to work. In some HDD if you have to disconnect to clone the drive it will now work. So if you fix the drive on any one of the doctor suite you can interface this with the DC and clone while the drive is still attached to the hd doctor tool.

But like I said if the drive is large than 500 GB you can still use the DC to clone with but you will need to use a program like winhex to do your cloning.

The DC does as it is advertised to do. If you have a HDD that has problems attached to your pc the DC can read it. clone it, and recover data off of it. But like all tools here the explaination is bad and hard to understand. The new manual is very well done and this can help all questions you have in this tool. It is a very detailed explaination of how to use this tool and what is designed for. On small drives it works great, it is portable, not made of plastic as you say but out of medal, and can be taken with you as a cloning tool as long as you do not have large drives to clone.

BTW I do not work for SD. I just try to clear up some of your misunderstanding on this tool that is all.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

I really don't know what this guy is talking about, but people talking like this is really devil and rude and smell smelly like rubbish, I never ever find such guy anywhere else, the world's only and best one...

_________________
Question yourself before decision

Just learn a lot from falther and poehere, thank you a lot!

_________________
Question yourself before decision

LOL...

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Just a quickie
Whne i spoke to slavation data to help me. i said recover data several times. I am sure they know the difference between recover and fix.
Any way- the problem of the software is there are no warnings.
Like mentioned above - use the case studies- read the manual top to bottom-because usually the bad news is hidden away under some other topic. So annoying.

_________________
It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
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thatdellguy, I can not understand why you are so happy about this. Please understand this correctly, Man, I am not talking about sd, I am talking about you. so far according to my contact with sd sales representatives, they do give me good impressions and explain everything clearly and answer my questions fast althought I haven't decided to buy from them.

you're a joke only and I will ignore everything you say. After I read so many posts by you and I asked sd as well, they told me, you just have one single hd doctor and you don't have other tools at all. so please keep silent until you have them.

_________________
Question yourself before decision

1. I could care less.
2. Your a bit late to the whole SD discussion.
3. My problems with SD have been resolved.
4. Judging an entire company by its sales staff is probably going to get you burned.


You should be a HDD Guru by now. Me and my fellow forum members can't wait to get your screw ups.


Do some more research.


LOL

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

I concur with that dell guy. want to buy my kit? I got all hd doctors and data compass.. free postage to you.

_________________
It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
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Actually i am comming down to Joburg this December-- i can pop in for a cupper and show you the basics. What you say ?

_________________
It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
Picasaweb- Pictures and movies | Dropbox - Documents and other..