I'm an awful wife and screwed up my husbands computer. HELP! UPDATE

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JennB

Honorable
Feb 11, 2013
14
0
10,510
Thank all of you so much or responding. I am so grateful for your time. This is their latest email response.

Hello Jennifer



It appears that perhaps the hard drive was upside down inside the unit so when coffee fell on top of it it quickly entered between the logic board and the HD's body.
There is a connector where the board and the read heads meet attached to the bottom of the hard drive (you can't see it when the board is on) which appears to be where the liquid entered. The area sort of ramps down making the situation worse.



I was so disappointed that I was unable to help you. I understand it had precious pictures of your son and also other very important documents. I Really Really wish I could have recovered the data for you.



Please call me A.S.A.P . Maybe I can get you a refund of your parts charge and provide you free return shipping. 888 526-4512

Harry
NDR


My son sloshed some coffee on my husbands army computer. No, I wasn't watching him, I was folding laundry. Yes, I take full responsibilty. And yes, my husband is irate.

I took it to a tech and he said there was 2 drops of coffee on the logic board of the HD. The HD would power up and spin, but shut down after 20 seconds. After researching data recovery places, I sent it to Nationwide data recovery. The reviews were pretty good. Only later did I see in some forums that they are pretty shady.



Of course it went exactly as the forums said it would. They charged a non-refundable $130 fee for new platters and donor parts. He said he gave it an 80% chance of recovery.



He later wrote that a small strip of coffee made its way into the power area? BUt he cleaned it, and the drive was powering up and spinning.



I get another email:

"The stack assembly exchange was completed a couple of days ago and the hard drive has been going through a bit by bit image copy of the whole drive. So far my techs are having no success with either the raw image scan or the 3 layered image scan. considering the heads are holding up I will attempt to fill the empty pockets of bad areas on the image collected so far with as many rouge digital fragments as possible and then try to decipher the results. Although I wish it was doing better, I'm an optimist. I will let you know right away with any changes in the results."





Today I get this:

Unfortunately after many attempts to create a complete bit by bit image of the hard drive the decipherment of the image collected has not produced any results.

My technicians have been unable to recover data from the drive you sent us for data recovery
because of the damage created on the platters from the previous head crash. For the last couple of days I've been trying to create as close to complete an image as possible without any positive results. I know how important this was to you and I wish I could have come through for you on this recovery. A lot was riding on this recovery. Maybe the future looks hopeful as technology improves. Don't throw away the hard drive. The future is bright for drives with platter damage.

Below are some issues encountered on this recovery.

1. It appears that the damage on the platters was too extensive (physical and magnetic) for a decipherable image..

2. The original read write heads at some point made contact with the platters damaging the surface of the platters and the read write heads.





I have no idea what this means. I did a google search for "head crash", and everything I read is saying a head crash is due to a fall. Can liquid cause a head crash? Should I even bother paying for the return, and should I pay for a second opinion?



THank you so much for your help. I feel horrible about what happened and am trying everything to get the data back. This could severely impact my husbands job. He did do a back up 2 weeks prior to the crash. But we still need some very important files that he didn't get a chance to back up.
 

JennB

Honorable
Feb 11, 2013
14
0
10,510



Yes, its for his master's degree. I guess it is like his thesis. No extensions, pretty much pass/fail.
 
This is not going to help you now but for next time as I think others have answered the recovery question. Tell your husband to take backups of is data. In fact its his fault if any data is lost. Hard drives die all the time, its not if, its when will it fail. You can burn my house down with my PC in it and I can still recover my data given I wasn't in my house at the time. If his data is so valuable that you are paying to have it recovered its valuable enough to backup properly. At minimum a backup to something that doesn't stay attached to the PC like an external hard drive you store in your master bedroom closet. At most a backup to the cloud or media that is stored somewhere other than your house.
 
Something like that so important he should have backed up I only see this as his fault not yours. He should have taken the lead in getting this fixed since this was his notebook after all why did he leave it where this could happen? Why didn't he have a back-up of this data. Where is the hard copy or his notes the used to create the data? I think dad has to share most of the blame, kids will be kids you have to put things out of their reach and back-up critical data.

I've worked in the computer hardware field since the IBM XT days and I've never ever heard of a drop of coffee penetrating a sealed drive and causing a head crash. Its just not possible there is something very shady going on there.
 

JennB

Honorable
Feb 11, 2013
14
0
10,510
I got an email response. Does this sound right?

Hello Jennifer



It appears that perhaps the hard drive was upside down inside the unit so when coffee fell on top of it it quickly entered between the logic board and the HD's body.
There is a connector where the board and the read heads meet attached to the bottom of the hard drive (you can't see it when the board is on) which appears to be where the liquid entered. The area sort of ramps down making the situation worse.



I was so disappointed that I was unable to help you. I understand it had precious pictures of your son and also other very important documents. I Really Really wish I could have recovered the data for you.



Please call me A.S.A.P . Maybe I can get you a refund of your parts charge and provide you free return shipping. 888 526-4512

Harry
NDR
 
The following article should help you visualise the HDD's component parts:
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

The connector referred to by Nationwide is the "heads contacts" at the bottom right corner of the following photo:
http://en.rlab.ru/doc/images/hdd_main_parts/HDA1.jpg

Here it is in close-up:
http://en.rlab.ru/doc/images/hdd_main_parts/contacts.jpg

It is located underneath the "plate with heads connectors" at the bottom left:
http://en.rlab.ru/doc/images/hdd_main_parts/HDA.jpg

The platters are the discs to the right, and the heads are at the pointy end of the long arm (HSA).

Notice the breath hole at the top left:
http://en.rlab.ru/doc/images/hdd_main_parts/HDA1.jpg

... and the actual filter underneath:
http://en.rlab.ru/doc/images/hdd_main_parts/HDA5.jpg
http://en.rlab.ru/doc/images/hdd_main_parts/breath-filter.jpg

BTW, if you are willing to pay $2K, then you should contact Kroll Ontrack. They are the recognised #1 data recovery company in the business.
 
Like the prior poster stated if its worth $2,000 then call Ontrack. They have a clean room and can pull the disk platters out of the drive(they look like old 33 records) to do the recovery.

This is a lesson of the value of backups, the hard way. Please learn from this and start taking backups, in Windows 7 the functionality is built right into the OS. For important papers I used to use a USB flash drive but today I sync them up in the cloud right after I make major updates.