Data Recovery

A friend of mine, and former boss, who owns a local retail shop called me yesterday and told me he thought the hard drive in his server was dead, and they havne’t been doing backups.  I paused for a moment and considered referring him to someone else, but decided to go ahead and see what I can do.  So I grabbed my copy of SpinRite and headed over to his shop.  I started Spin-Rite up and left, then returned about 8 hours later, it was at 0.0010%.  Apparently there are problems with the hard drive.  I opted to take the system with me and brought it back to my workshop.  I tried starting Spin-Rite at different areas of the hard drive and it worked well, without finding any errors, and managed to get through those sections much quicker, so I’m assuming its just the first few sectors of the hard drive, the most impartant part, that are damaged.  I stayed up til about 1AM trying different things, looking for a quick way to get the data he needed (data=entire point of sale database: vendors, inventory, customers), but unfortunately there won’t be a quick way.

So right now I’m making an image of the drive with dd, having it skip errors, hoping I can glean the data we need.  Once the image is done, I’ll start Spin-Rite back up and let it run for a few days.  I’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out.

The moral of this all too familiar story:  BACKUP!! BACKUP!! BACKUP!!