Tequila and Hard Drive Recovery

Don't ask me why I thought those things would go together, but that's how I spent my evening last night. It all started after another night of drinking a week ago with a friend of mine. After I had a few, he came out with the old, "you're good with computers, right?" Of course, against my better judgment, I said yes. I probably shouldn't have had that last beer.

His laptop wouldn't boot. A laptop used for business, a laptop that didn't have any backups. Or at least there were some backups for some of the files, but those were with his ex, and well, never mind. Let's say there's no backups.

I'm a sucker when it comes to friends with computer problems. I also like to fiddle with stuff, and always like a challenge. And since I had abandoned my family in the Dominican Republic, I had some time on my hands, so I took the case.

The computer wouldn't boot. It froze while the Windows XP splash screen was fading in. In safe mode, it stopped responding after loading agp440.dll. There's nothing safer than safe mode, so I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere with that drive installed.

I swapped the hard drive to another laptop, and it had the same symptom, so that ruled out the motherboard, memory, and everything else that's not the hard drive. Just for completeness, I put my hard drive in his laptop, and it booted up fine. So nothing in his computer was broken. It also installed a bunch of drivers specific to his system before I could tell it to stop, so now my laptop is kind of hosed. I still can't get sound to work. Oh well.

I decided I can't do jack unless I can mount the drive as a secondary (non-boot) drive, so I ordered a USB drive enclosure from Newegg. Presumably, I'd be able to just yoink the files off the drive, and be the hero.

4 days after I ordered the hard drive enclosure, it arrived, and I hooked everything up. Getting ready to start the copy and relax with some Mythbusters, I poured myself a margarita.

Not so fast.

"The file or directory is corrupt and unreadable." That was unexpected. Something fundamental like the partition table was broken, so it didn't even show up as a valid drive. Linux wouldn't mount it either. The margarita was good.

I wondered if the drive enclosure was bad. I put in my hard drive and it failed in just the same way. Damn. Four days waiting for a bad USB enclosure. Now I've got to start all over again. Another margarita would numb the pain a little bit.

I tried a third hard drive, and it worked. After a bunch of fiddling, I realized that if I don't reboot after connecting the bad drive, Windows thinks all drives in the same enclosure are bad. After rebooting, all but the problem drive work correctly in the USB enclosure. That's a relief, but the drive still doesn't work. About now, I'm running out of margarita mix, so I make the next one 50/50 instead of 1:3 like I'm supposed to. It was still good. Definitely more tequila flavor that way.

The drive wasn't physically damaged, so I knew the data had to be on there. But without the benefit of a file system, I started looking for a program that would scan the entire drive and look for files.

I found a program called "Get Data Back," and it does what it says. (Maybe they'll become a sponsor.) I downloaded the demo, and told it to scan the drive, and it started reporting how many files it found. (Plenty.) I left it for the 30 minutes it asked for, and came back surprised to see not only had it found the files, but it had all the file names, and had reconstructed the original directory structure. And it allowed me to open all the files and look at them, so I opened a bunch of random documents and sure enough, everything was intact.

If I wanted to restore all the files, though, I had to pay the license fee. $79.00 Ouch. I sent an email to my friend. "I found your data, but getting it back will cost you." I briefly considered how long it would take me to save the files one by one. If only 10% of the 200,000 files were important, then about 27 hours if I could do a file every 5 seconds. Not worth it.

Another 50/50 margarita to polish off the margarita mix, and I'm off to bed.

But I stopped short. Not content to give up so easily, I decided to look for a free solution. I tried "PC Inspector File Recovery," which was highly recommended on the interwebs, but did not work as well. It found half as many files, and none of them had file names or directories, and they were all suspiciously the same size. I had very little confidence that it was working, and searching through 10,000 files named file12345.doc to find a particular document was not appealing.

Out of mix, I had one last tequila. Yow, straight tequila is rough, even after a string of margaritas. It wasn't up to me whether to pay for the software. Maybe he didn't care that much for his old files, so I went to bed for real this time. I slept pretty well, too.

Ultimately, my friend decided that his data was worth the ransom, so he bought a license for Get Data Back and sent me the registration code. At once, it started dumping his files onto my hard drive. I probably would have felt smarter if I could find a way to do it more cheaply, but in the end that's kind of stupid when the problem is already solved.

I don't know what the point of this story was. I like recovery tools that work. And I'm getting used to the taste of tequila, too.


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