Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tex stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor at how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as he always does on the
Speaker 1: occasions on which we podcast, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: What we have here is a failure to communicate. Isn't
Speaker 1: that the point of the podcast? I think some of
Speaker 1: our podcasts have been a failure to communicate. That's true, okay,
Speaker 1: but we've gotten better, uh in some people's eyes. So
Speaker 1: let's tackle this topic. What are we talking about today, Chris,
Speaker 1: We're talking about hard drives, or possibly the lack thereof,
Speaker 1: depending on what happened to them. I got you now,
Speaker 1: We've already done a podcast about hard drives. It actually
Speaker 1: wasn't that long ago. But one thing we didn't really
Speaker 1: touch on is how do you get data off a
Speaker 1: hard drive if the hard drive has suffered some some problems,
Speaker 1: if it has crashed in some way or another, and uh,
Speaker 1: really to get this out of the way, depending upon
Speaker 1: the severity of the crash, there may not be anything
Speaker 1: you personally, as in the average customer or average user
Speaker 1: can do to recover that data. Doesn't mean that there's
Speaker 1: no way to get the data back. It just means that,
Speaker 1: depending upon the severity and nature of the crash, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's better to hand it over to a professionals. And
Speaker 1: we'll get into why. Um, but let's go ahead and
Speaker 1: talk about the fact that there are two major categories
Speaker 1: of hard drive failures. There are logical failures, which I
Speaker 1: suffer on a daily basis, not through my hard drive,
Speaker 1: just me by myself. Um. And logical failures that's when
Speaker 1: your hard drive suffers some sort of corruption or there's
Speaker 1: a logical error where the computer cannot recognize the drive,
Speaker 1: can't access the information that's on that drive. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: you've ever had had files go corrupt on you, that's
Speaker 1: sort of like what's going on here. Your operating system
Speaker 1: can become corrupt and in a lot of cases it
Speaker 1: basically well, we can get into the details of that later,
Speaker 1: but that's that's what's going on. You can't you can't
Speaker 1: read files on it. Yeah. Um, And this can happen
Speaker 1: from either again, as Poletts said, like a file, a
Speaker 1: file becomes corrupted. Uh, you could get a virus that
Speaker 1: does this sort of thing. Um, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of nasty malware out there that kind of does this
Speaker 1: to your hard drive. Uh. And as a result, your
Speaker 1: your system bios may recognize the drive, but it's not
Speaker 1: going to boot it, and then you're gonna think, okay,
Speaker 1: well what are my options? Uh. So that's one type
Speaker 1: of failure. The other type of failure is a physical
Speaker 1: failure of the drive. Now we're mainly talking about, um,
Speaker 1: the platter based hard drives here, not the solid state.
Speaker 1: Solid state can also suffer physical failures. Uh. Physical damage
Speaker 1: that as a result of things like being exposed to
Speaker 1: magnetic fields, are actually suffering physical damage. But it's a different,
Speaker 1: different kind of damage than the platter based hard drives. Right,
Speaker 1: just as a refresher if you didn't listen to the
Speaker 1: hard drive podcast or have forgotten. In a typical traditional
Speaker 1: hard drive, you've got a mechanism that is spinning platters.
Speaker 1: And Uh, in addition to that mechanism that is spinning platters,
Speaker 1: there is a head that is a very very very
Speaker 1: minute distance apart from the platters. It doesn't actually touch
Speaker 1: the platters read and write to well. No, I mean
Speaker 1: and in a typical operating, normally operating hard drive it
Speaker 1: is it is there to read and write information to it,
Speaker 1: but it does not touch the platters. Now, if the
Speaker 1: drive mechanism breaks down, if the pins the connectors that
Speaker 1: connected to your computer break um, if the head actually
Speaker 1: touches the platters, which is known as a head crash. Um.
Speaker 1: If any of those things happens, you can suffer a
Speaker 1: mechanical failure to your hard drive and your computer may
Speaker 1: no longer be able to operate that device right. And
Speaker 1: mechanical failures happen for many different reasons. Uh. It could
Speaker 1: just be from physically moving a computer around and you've
Speaker 1: jostled something loose. It could be just the fact that
Speaker 1: you know it's mechanical. Things are moving over and over
Speaker 1: and over, and if you have something long enough, those
Speaker 1: parts are going to start to have wear and tear
Speaker 1: and eventually will break. Or it could be that your
Speaker 1: computer perhaps is generating too much heat and the heat
Speaker 1: in turn is expanding the elements within your hard drive
Speaker 1: and that is what's causing stuff to uh to to
Speaker 1: not operate the way it's supposed to heat bad for
Speaker 1: hard drive. Heat is not a good thing. And of
Speaker 1: course they generate them because they're mechanical, yes, and then
Speaker 1: they're you know the whole friction thing. Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: and I. In either case, you're going to have a
Speaker 1: situation where you're not going to be able to access
Speaker 1: the information that's stored on that hard drive. And depending
Speaker 1: upon the severity of the problem, either with a logical
Speaker 1: or a mechanical issue, you may or may not be
Speaker 1: able to retrieve this data on your own. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of different kind of do it yourself things
Speaker 1: you can attempt, depending upon the type of problem you have.
Speaker 1: Let's say that you have a logical problem, for example,
Speaker 1: with your hard drive. Um, if you are fairly adept
Speaker 1: at handling computers, you know you know the ground yourself
Speaker 1: before you touch anything inside a computer, for example, and
Speaker 1: that you don't feel ill at ease messing around on
Speaker 1: the inerts of a computer. And this mainly applies to desktops.
Speaker 1: Laptops are a lot harder to to do do it
Speaker 1: yourself projects on just because the way they're constructed, especially
Speaker 1: for people who are less experienced with those projects. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of them require special tools just to get the
Speaker 1: case open, because they're using proprietary screws to hold them closed.
Speaker 1: My fears always how do I get everything back in
Speaker 1: it the way it came? YEA for those of us
Speaker 1: who had the kind of childhood where we um took
Speaker 1: stuff apart to see how it worked, and then realized
Speaker 1: that when we put it back together it was never
Speaker 1: going to work again. We get nervous when we start
Speaker 1: opening up computers. But you may be able to remove
Speaker 1: the hard drive, not open up the hard drive case.
Speaker 1: Never ever ever open up the hard drive case, well
Speaker 1: at least not if you expect it to ever work again. Right.
Speaker 1: If you want the data that's on that hard drive,
Speaker 1: you will not open it. I mean, okay, if you
Speaker 1: have a clean room and you are trained to do
Speaker 1: this kind of thing, and you're a data recovery specialist,
Speaker 1: sure then you can open up the hard drive. But
Speaker 1: for everybody else, do not do it right because those
Speaker 1: platters on the on the physical hard drives, the platter
Speaker 1: based hard drives, um, if you get any dust on that,
Speaker 1: it can it can cause that data to to be
Speaker 1: inaccessible forever. You don't want to get dirty. You don't
Speaker 1: want to get scratched. You don't wanna. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are chances that you could clean it or have someone
Speaker 1: clean it and get that data back. But just in
Speaker 1: the process of trying to read that that platter, you're
Speaker 1: going to find out that you can't get the files
Speaker 1: that you thought you were gonna be able to get
Speaker 1: just because they got dirty, right right, Well, you know
Speaker 1: that that's do you want to keep going with the
Speaker 1: logical stuff with the mechanical stuff because I was I
Speaker 1: have a good bit of information on how they they
Speaker 1: get that information back on a mechanical drive, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to get into that. Let's do Let's go
Speaker 1: with mechanical first, because the mechanical, depending upon again the severity,
Speaker 1: you may be able to do some stuff yourself. Here here,
Speaker 1: here's something that you could potentially do with a mechanical failure.
Speaker 1: Now that this is a mechanical failure where uh, I'll
Speaker 1: give you three different examples. Here's one where your your
Speaker 1: drive is spinning. Here it's spinning, but there's a clicking noise,
Speaker 1: something is hitting against something else that's not good. Here's
Speaker 1: something that you may have heard that you can do.
Speaker 1: You may have heard that you could put your hard
Speaker 1: drive in the freezer. Yes, I have heard that you
Speaker 1: can do that. I mean, granted, obviously you can do that.
Speaker 1: Assuming there's room in your freezer. You could do that.
Speaker 1: And actually, the surprising thing is this can work. Uh.
Speaker 1: Of course would have to remove it from the computer first. Yes, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: there are some intermediate steps removing it from the computer,
Speaker 1: putting it into a ziploc bag so that you don't
Speaker 1: get any condensation on your hard drive, um, and then
Speaker 1: putting it into the freezer for around twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: The reason why this might work, this, by the way,
Speaker 1: does not fix the drive. It's just a temporary measure
Speaker 1: so you can get the data off the drive onto
Speaker 1: something else. The reason why this works is because the
Speaker 1: cold will cause the various components within the hard drive
Speaker 1: to contract. So if it if the reason why it's
Speaker 1: it's hitting against stuff is because something slightly out of
Speaker 1: alignment or heating has caused things to warp a little bit.
Speaker 1: Contracting may cause it to get close enough back to
Speaker 1: the original positions for it to run for a short
Speaker 1: period of time and I'm talking like half an hour max.
Speaker 1: So with that in mind, if you've if you could
Speaker 1: put your hard drive in the freezer, and you have
Speaker 1: it set up so that you'r you can capture the
Speaker 1: data that's on that hard drive, either using another computer
Speaker 1: or your first computer with a new hard drive in it. Whatever,
Speaker 1: you can give that a try. You can hook the
Speaker 1: hard drive back up to a computer, boot it up
Speaker 1: and see if it's running, and it might run fine. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's not gonna run fine for very long because
Speaker 1: as soon as it heats up, it's gonna start warping
Speaker 1: again or or breaking down. So you only have a
Speaker 1: route about, like I said, thirty minutes maybe maximum to
Speaker 1: get the data from that hard drive onto a different
Speaker 1: storage device. Uh. Here's something that I feel that we
Speaker 1: should mention. What's that that? Um, when we're talking about
Speaker 1: these home remedies, keeping in mind that you know, if
Speaker 1: you try this, you're trying it at your own risk. Yes,
Speaker 1: we do not recommend doing this and saying that it's
Speaker 1: going to to fix everything and you're going to be
Speaker 1: able to get your You will absolutely be able to
Speaker 1: do this successfully without any problems. There's a good chance
Speaker 1: that you may not get anything from these home remedies,
Speaker 1: But the reason that people try them is to avoid
Speaker 1: paying the very large fees the data recovery services charge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, like because because to do data
Speaker 1: recovery right quote unquote right to the point where you
Speaker 1: know you're going to get you know, over the data back. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's a complicated and technical process, and so it
Speaker 1: does cost a pretty penny. Um is not an unusual
Speaker 1: fee to see in in data recovery services. Is at
Speaker 1: an unusual fee to see in data recovery services. But
Speaker 1: did you want to keep going with the one more
Speaker 1: home rent or well, kind of like you do a
Speaker 1: combo home renmedate. Let's say that you're hard drive is
Speaker 1: not spinning, so it won't spin up right there? There
Speaker 1: is a a method where that you can try, if
Speaker 1: you're brave to uh, to see if you can get
Speaker 1: it spinning again, which is, again remove the hard drive
Speaker 1: from your computer, and then use what I like to
Speaker 1: call the Fawn's method. You give it a whack with
Speaker 1: the palm of your hand a rubber mallet. Maybe you
Speaker 1: drop it from just a few inches above the table,
Speaker 1: and that might unstick whatever is stuck inside your hard drive.
Speaker 1: I don't recommend it, but it is it has been
Speaker 1: known to work. It has been known to unstick elements
Speaker 1: that have caught together within hard drives. And again it's
Speaker 1: another method where it's a temporary fix. You need to
Speaker 1: get that data off a SAP. Uh So, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the the hit and or drop method. Those are the
Speaker 1: three do it yourself methods for mechanical failures that I
Speaker 1: happen to know off the top of my head. Okay, well, um,
Speaker 1: you may be saying, okay, so a minute ago, you
Speaker 1: you guys were talking about the data recovery services. Well,
Speaker 1: what did they do that so special? Lets them charge
Speaker 1: that much money for it? A lot of the data
Speaker 1: recovery services out there, Um, when you take your drive
Speaker 1: to them when it's busted, you know that it's a
Speaker 1: mechanical failure going on because you hear the clicking noise,
Speaker 1: or it won't spin up, and or you can see
Speaker 1: that the pins have been damaged and you need to
Speaker 1: get the information off of there, perhaps as soon as
Speaker 1: you know right now. Um, this is where the data
Speaker 1: recovery services shine. And there may be somebody in your
Speaker 1: hometown or maybe somebody that you need to mail it off.
Speaker 1: Uh two. But the thing is what they're gonna do
Speaker 1: when you do that is they will They will probably
Speaker 1: charge you a small fee, maybe hundred dollars, maybe even nothing.
Speaker 1: Maybe they'll do it for free. But what they'll do
Speaker 1: is they'll evaluate the drive to see whether or not
Speaker 1: they can actually do anything with it. If they think
Speaker 1: they can work with it, they'll let you know, and
Speaker 1: they'll let you know approximately how successful they think they'll be.
Speaker 1: And what happens is when you say, okay, yeah, go
Speaker 1: ahead and pull all the data off of there. They're
Speaker 1: not going to repair the drive for you. There's not
Speaker 1: going to be a lot that they can do in
Speaker 1: the event of a mechanical failure. Like Jonathan was saying
Speaker 1: just a moment ago, there's there's only so long that
Speaker 1: that drive is going to work in its current state,
Speaker 1: if it will work at all. Um So, what they're
Speaker 1: going to do is a very good data recovery service
Speaker 1: is going to have what they call a Class one
Speaker 1: clean room. Yeah, this is a room that filters the
Speaker 1: air so that there are fewer than a hundred particulates
Speaker 1: floating around inside that room, no bigger than half a
Speaker 1: micron in size. We're talking a very very clean clean room.
Speaker 1: And so you've heard us talk about clean rooms before,
Speaker 1: because we chatted about it when we were talking about
Speaker 1: building chips like microprocessors. The fact that you need that
Speaker 1: because the elements on these chips are so small that
Speaker 1: a moat of dust dwarfs them, and therefore, if it
Speaker 1: gets on you know, some silicon when you're about to
Speaker 1: process press press eight chip, it's going to ruin that chip. Yeah,
Speaker 1: same sort of thing here. You know, you can't get
Speaker 1: these things. If you want to be able to retrieve
Speaker 1: the data from these these crashed hard drives, the platters
Speaker 1: have to be clean, yes, And I mean if you're
Speaker 1: trying to if if they're trying to get your data
Speaker 1: back and you've had a head crash and their actual
Speaker 1: gouges in the surface of the platter um adding dust
Speaker 1: to it, it's not going to help anything. You're just
Speaker 1: gonna make their job even even more difficult. So they're
Speaker 1: going to take the drive apart in a clean room,
Speaker 1: and what they're gonna do is they're going to examine
Speaker 1: it to see what's going on. So if the drive
Speaker 1: mechanism is bad, they're going to move the platters to
Speaker 1: uh a mechanism that will work so that they can
Speaker 1: get the information off of their and enshort. What they're
Speaker 1: gonna do is they're going to retrieve the information and
Speaker 1: you know, burn it to a disk for you so
Speaker 1: that you can retrieve the information. Your hard drive is shot,
Speaker 1: but um, it sort of depends on what's going on
Speaker 1: with it now. Jonathan was also talking about getting stuff
Speaker 1: on it. If your drive has been submerged in water
Speaker 1: or you know, caught in a fire. Say you're your
Speaker 1: fan stopped working in your desktop computer and it started
Speaker 1: a small fire. You put it out, but your hard
Speaker 1: drive got caught in there. Maybe it's only suffered you know,
Speaker 1: a little smoke damage, but you still can't use it.
Speaker 1: They're going to have to take the platters out and
Speaker 1: clean them very carefully with the with the solution that
Speaker 1: they use for that kind of thing, something that's not
Speaker 1: going to affect the readA or right ability of the
Speaker 1: platter I guess, and put it in a mechanism again
Speaker 1: that that will work. Uh, and do that now. And
Speaker 1: when we say mechanism a lot of these hard drives,
Speaker 1: what you have to do is have an identical working
Speaker 1: hard drive. Because hard drives come in different shapes and sizes,
Speaker 1: they come in differently. You know it's and it's just
Speaker 1: one of those things where it's not like they have
Speaker 1: a universal device and you put a platter in there
Speaker 1: and it's gonna work perfectly. That's another reason why it's
Speaker 1: so expensive for these for these businesses to work properly,
Speaker 1: they need to have spare parts from lots and lots
Speaker 1: of different uh hard drives. Um. One of the other
Speaker 1: kind of physical failures, which you know, I didn't really
Speaker 1: chat about because again I was focusing on the do
Speaker 1: it yourself, and this is really not to do it yourself,
Speaker 1: is an electronic failure where the circuit board beneath your
Speaker 1: hard drive, the thing that connects the connecting point between
Speaker 1: your hard drive and your actual computer, the physical connecting
Speaker 1: point that can have a problem, that can suffer a failure,
Speaker 1: in which case you really need someone else to fix it,
Speaker 1: like to give you an identical circuit board and connect
Speaker 1: it all together properly for to to come back, and
Speaker 1: you may not even be able to do that. That
Speaker 1: computer might be shot or you may have to rebuild
Speaker 1: from that that point on, in which case data recovery
Speaker 1: is really your only, your only option to get that
Speaker 1: information back anyway. You're not gonna you know, it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily repair thing, it's a recovery. So uh. Again, if
Speaker 1: you take it to a data recovery specialists, they're going
Speaker 1: to have to have those parts in stock to be
Speaker 1: able to to do anything, because again it's not a
Speaker 1: one size fits all sort of model. Everything's proprietary. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The most the most serious problem that you could have
Speaker 1: as a mechanical failure, I would say, is when there's
Speaker 1: actual physical damage to the platters themselves, the likelihood of
Speaker 1: getting information back off of that that disk is less
Speaker 1: than a lot. It depends on It depends on a
Speaker 1: lot of different factors, how bad the gouges are and
Speaker 1: where they are on the disc, and how good your
Speaker 1: data recovery specialist is. There's some data recovery specialists out
Speaker 1: there who have men age to retrieve data from hard
Speaker 1: drives that I would have sworn were beyond the ability
Speaker 1: to to salvage UM. And you actually had a really
Speaker 1: good example of that. You send it to me about
Speaker 1: the uh, the hard drive recovered from a Space shuttle. Yes,
Speaker 1: the Space Shuttle Columbia, which, as many of you will remember,
Speaker 1: UM had a a problem that caused it to burn
Speaker 1: up on re entry and it broke apart, of course,
Speaker 1: killing me the astronauts on board unfortunately, and UM, of course,
Speaker 1: a lot of the parts were recovered. A lot of
Speaker 1: the pieces of the shuttle were recovered, including at least
Speaker 1: three of the hard drives, and UM NASA sent those
Speaker 1: UH to one of the giants in the industry and
Speaker 1: all on track UM to have them recovered. Now, two
Speaker 1: of the drives that that were mentioned in this MSNBC
Speaker 1: article UM they had a whole media section with lots
Speaker 1: and lots of articles about what they do UM, as
Speaker 1: as many good marketers will do UM. But they had
Speaker 1: an the article on MSNBC U it was really fascinating
Speaker 1: because two of their hard drives were burned so badly
Speaker 1: that they really couldn't do much with it. Another one, however,
Speaker 1: UM had suffered a had suffered damage to the platters,
Speaker 1: but they were able to clean the platters off and
Speaker 1: get the information, not because UM, you know, the gouges
Speaker 1: weren't significant, but because the data had stopped writing short
Speaker 1: of where the gouges were, so that the data was
Speaker 1: intact up to the point where the gauges started. The
Speaker 1: undamaged part of the platter. It was the part that
Speaker 1: actually had data written to it was the damaged part.
Speaker 1: No data had been written to that section yet. And
Speaker 1: you may remember in our hard drive podcast we talked
Speaker 1: about how when you write information to a hard drive,
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily do it sequentially on the platter itself.
Speaker 1: So you're trying to you're not necessarily gonna have two
Speaker 1: sectors next to each other containing one really big file. Well,
Speaker 1: in that particular instance, you did because they were using sauce,
Speaker 1: which has a different way. I mean, it actually stored
Speaker 1: data sequentially on the hard drive, so it wasn't saved.
Speaker 1: Willy nilly, I'm sorry, I keep talking. Every keep just interrupting.
Speaker 1: You keep going, please, um no, No. That That's the
Speaker 1: thing about about that is that in this case they
Speaker 1: were the drive recovery specialists who were able to save
Speaker 1: information that the scientists said can had conducted while they
Speaker 1: were out in space. So that was a very very
Speaker 1: positive outcome for that particular instance. But unfortunately, the other
Speaker 1: two drives were damaged beyond repair, and that you know,
Speaker 1: is certainly not unheard of even for the best of
Speaker 1: the best. Right, Yeah, if the if the platters have
Speaker 1: suffered real severe damage, then there may be nothing you
Speaker 1: can do. Um, you mentioned flooding. I was gonna point this.
Speaker 1: This is not really a do it yourself but this
Speaker 1: is one of those things that it's good to know
Speaker 1: in case you ever are in a situation where, uh,
Speaker 1: you have a hard drive that's been submerged in water,
Speaker 1: but for you take it to a specialist, you may
Speaker 1: want to continue to have it submerged in water. Really yeah,
Speaker 1: here's the reason why. Uh. When the water gets into
Speaker 1: the hard drive, it can be caring, carrying lots of
Speaker 1: particulate matter along with the water. When that hard drive
Speaker 1: dries out, that particulate matter can adhere to the platters
Speaker 1: on your hard drive. I see. So that can make
Speaker 1: it more difficult to clean the hard drive and makes
Speaker 1: it less likely that you're going to get all your
Speaker 1: data back. Um, if you submerge the hard drive in water,
Speaker 1: that can keep the particulates uh kind of suspended in
Speaker 1: the solution of the water, and you can take it
Speaker 1: to the recovery specialists who can then in a very
Speaker 1: controlled manner, remove the hard drive, dry it out, and
Speaker 1: clean it so that it's these little particulates don't get
Speaker 1: stuck to the platters. So what you're saying is if
Speaker 1: it's if it's still submerged in water, keep it still
Speaker 1: submerged in water. Yeah, yeah, because I would assume that
Speaker 1: if it had been you know, if you had had
Speaker 1: a flood in your house and you would evacuated, the
Speaker 1: water was gone, everything was dry ish. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: come you're probably the damage is probably if you come
Speaker 1: back and it's and it's already been dried out, then
Speaker 1: there's not really any point and you submerging it again
Speaker 1: because if it's those particulars have adhered to the platter,
Speaker 1: there's very little likelihood that they're going to to detach
Speaker 1: once you submerge it back in water. So no need
Speaker 1: to to go to that step. But if it is
Speaker 1: submerged in water, you may as well continue to do that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's again anytime there's gonna be water and electronics,
Speaker 1: you have to be really careful. There's always the danger
Speaker 1: of electrocution. But you know, assuming you're able to get
Speaker 1: the hard drive out safely, uh, it is not a
Speaker 1: bad idea to go ahead and keep it submerged in
Speaker 1: water until you can get it to a recovery specialist.
Speaker 1: The damage has already done. Really yeah. Yeah, Now, a
Speaker 1: data recovery specialists can also help you with a logical
Speaker 1: hard drive failure, although they may not need to. There
Speaker 1: may be some things that you can do yourself. Right, So,
Speaker 1: if you've got a corrupted file system or you've got
Speaker 1: a virus on that hard drive, uh, sometimes you can
Speaker 1: remove that hard drive from your computer, put it in
Speaker 1: say an external case, and connect it to a working computer.
Speaker 1: If you have the right software, you may be able
Speaker 1: to scan that hard drive and be able to without
Speaker 1: going into any further detail, you might be able to
Speaker 1: just pull the data directly off of it and put
Speaker 1: it onto another storage system. Uh. That's the best case scenario. Really. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you might also might be able to. Uh. It's also
Speaker 1: not a bad idea to keep an emergency boot c
Speaker 1: D around too, which would would help you with that too,
Speaker 1: because if you have UM one of the major anti
Speaker 1: virus UH utilities and those types of the computer utilities discs,
Speaker 1: they'll let you burn a CD ROM or DVD. I
Speaker 1: guess that would allow you to boot up your computer
Speaker 1: and it would run off of the disk, allowing to
Speaker 1: scan your hard drive and make sure that it isn't
Speaker 1: in any way corrupted or that it's got a virus.
Speaker 1: They may be able to fix it that way. But um,
Speaker 1: you know, in generals, a lot of the problems that
Speaker 1: come from this is uh, from the pointers that go
Speaker 1: to the files. I mean, that's what happens. When you
Speaker 1: delete something, You're you're basically racing the pointers to the file,
Speaker 1: and that allows the sector to be rewritten, you know,
Speaker 1: when you do something else. But if the file hasn't
Speaker 1: been written over and the pointers are missing, those can
Speaker 1: be re established. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. Um,
Speaker 1: when you delete something from a hard drive, it's not
Speaker 1: really gone yet, right. Um. It's essentially when you delete
Speaker 1: something from your hard drive, you're essentially giving your computer
Speaker 1: a direction saying this data is no longer important to me,
Speaker 1: so the next time I am writing data, this space
Speaker 1: is available to be written over. Um. It's so there's
Speaker 1: even a chance if you've deleted something, if you haven't
Speaker 1: written anything new to the hard drive, there's a good
Speaker 1: you can recover that. Saying there's a chance, I mean
Speaker 1: you can recover that. But if you've started to write
Speaker 1: stuff to the hard drive again, like you've saved a
Speaker 1: new program to the hard drive, there's a chance that
Speaker 1: the sectors that contained the data from that file you
Speaker 1: accidentally deleted were some of the sectors that they got
Speaker 1: written to. So UH, that's one thing I wanted to
Speaker 1: to mention too. We were talking about the software that
Speaker 1: allows you to scan uh your hard drive to to
Speaker 1: correct any file corruption or to try and find files. UM.
Speaker 1: This software can be pretty expensive. Again, like is not
Speaker 1: unusual for the kind of software that that does a
Speaker 1: pretty good job at uh at looking for files on
Speaker 1: a corrupt logic problem on a hard drive. And and
Speaker 1: they're specific to different operating systems. So you know, the
Speaker 1: Windows operating system, the Linux, the mac os all have
Speaker 1: different UM software for those and at different price points.
Speaker 1: You want to be careful when you choose a recovery
Speaker 1: software package because if you if that recovery software package
Speaker 1: in turn rights to the hard drive as a part
Speaker 1: of trying to scan it, uh, that means you could
Speaker 1: lose data because it's writing over something that's already there.
Speaker 1: Once you write over it it, I'm not gonna say
Speaker 1: it's impossible, because lord knows, I'm not gonna say it's
Speaker 1: impossible to get the data back if you overwrite it. Uh.
Speaker 1: Because every single time someone says that something pops up
Speaker 1: where it becomes an exception to the rule, but it
Speaker 1: is immeasurably more difficult to get that data back right.
Speaker 1: And that's something to keep in mind too. If you're
Speaker 1: intentionally trying to delete stuff thinking that the cops will
Speaker 1: never find it, yeah, they might be able to because
Speaker 1: it drive recovery specialist can probably get it back. You
Speaker 1: pretty much have to delete everything right over every thing
Speaker 1: deleted again, right over it again. I mean, they're there
Speaker 1: are people who are experts at getting rid of data
Speaker 1: where you're doing it electronically and you're not just determined
Speaker 1: to destroy the hard drive because you can always do
Speaker 1: that well, they said. Even the information I got when
Speaker 1: I was doing research suggested that even you know, taking
Speaker 1: a pair of pliers to a platter may not damage
Speaker 1: all of it, I mean, which is why magnet would help.
Speaker 1: There was that one if you're trying to destroy it,
Speaker 1: there was that one company that we saw. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you were, I don't know if this was
Speaker 1: one of the years that you went, but at CES
Speaker 1: there was a company that specifically specialized in destroying hard
Speaker 1: drives so that the data was not recoverable. Um and
Speaker 1: they had a couple of different methods, and one of
Speaker 1: them was that it would just punch an enormous hole
Speaker 1: through the entire hard drive using a essentially an industrial
Speaker 1: sized drill press kind of thing. Even then you might
Speaker 1: be able to find it. But there was another one
Speaker 1: that would tread the platters. Yeah, that one pretty much
Speaker 1: do it. That does it. Yeah, you're it's gonna be
Speaker 1: really hard to get any information out of a shredded platter, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wine, so yeah. If it's a if it's a
Speaker 1: logic problem, usually there's some sort of software that you
Speaker 1: can use to attempt to get at that data. Occasionally,
Speaker 1: the problem is going to be so specific or so
Speaker 1: unusual that that unless you have exactly the right program,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be able to do it yourself.
Speaker 1: And again you may have to take that into a
Speaker 1: data recovery specialist who will use their own software to
Speaker 1: scan and image your hard drive and then dump all
Speaker 1: the stuff. You should also know that if you're using
Speaker 1: the these um software packages, a lot of them, when
Speaker 1: they pull data off of your hard drive, are going
Speaker 1: to organize your data in big lumps so that it's
Speaker 1: not gonna be in the nice little file tree system
Speaker 1: that you had set up back when it was your
Speaker 1: hard drive and everything was hunky dory. Right, You're likely
Speaker 1: to get a list of files. Right. You might get
Speaker 1: a full or that has all image files in it,
Speaker 1: which means that you're going to get a folder that
Speaker 1: has all the pictures you've taken and things like that,
Speaker 1: plus all the little image files from every single program
Speaker 1: you have on there. So it's all in a huge
Speaker 1: disorganized lump. Uh, the same thing like all the all
Speaker 1: the document files will be together, you know, all anything
Speaker 1: that's a specific file type might be lumped together into
Speaker 1: a single folder, which, uh, that's really You're not necessarily
Speaker 1: gonna be able to use all the programs that you
Speaker 1: had before, but at least you'll be able to access
Speaker 1: certain you know, whatever files are at least easily findable
Speaker 1: in there, right, right, And I mean if it's something
Speaker 1: that's that's truly important, especially for business reasons, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're just some things that you're gonna want to
Speaker 1: save period, you know, family photos there. You know, these
Speaker 1: things can't be replaced. So and uh, this is a
Speaker 1: good time for another reminder. Back up your hard drive
Speaker 1: always a good idea. Yeah, always. We We say it
Speaker 1: every single time we talk about any kind of hard
Speaker 1: drive issue. Back up your data, because things do go wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's even if you're doing everything right,
Speaker 1: Systems can break down. Systems do breakdown. It's kind of
Speaker 1: this whole in tropic thing that we have going on
Speaker 1: in the universe. So you need to take precautions against it,
Speaker 1: and you know, treat your backup systems really well too,
Speaker 1: because backup systems could fail as well. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that you have to make endless backups of your data,
Speaker 1: but always make sure you have at least one viable
Speaker 1: one sitting around. Not a bad idea. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know that might even involve saving to the cloud,
Speaker 1: because a nice thing about most cloud systems is a
Speaker 1: lot of them have built in redundancy, So the data
Speaker 1: that you save to the cloud ends up being stored
Speaker 1: on multiple machines because, just like any other machine, those
Speaker 1: servers can break down too. That's true. Well I think
Speaker 1: that did you? Did you have anything else to add? No?
Speaker 1: Not really, I think we we pretty much got into
Speaker 1: most of it. Cool. So yeah, I hope all of
Speaker 1: you listeners out there never suffer a hard drive crash
Speaker 1: on the level that we're talking about here. Hopefully what
Speaker 1: will happen is you're all really really happy and wealthy,
Speaker 1: and then every time you get bored of a computer,
Speaker 1: you just go out and buy a new one, and
Speaker 1: that way you never have to worry about our drives
Speaker 1: getting old because you don't keep them long enough. And uh,
Speaker 1: if you have all this cash, why haven't you bought
Speaker 1: us presence? That was a joke by corporate by corporate policy.
Speaker 1: I cannot accept any presence other than cookies because those
Speaker 1: were awesome. Yeah, So, if any of you have any questions, comments,
Speaker 1: you have a topic you want to suggest, you can
Speaker 1: write us. Our email address is tech stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff
Speaker 1: and be sure to check us out on Twitter text
Speaker 1: stuff hs wsr hand and you can also find us
Speaker 1: on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech Stuff h
Speaker 1: s W. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to
Speaker 1: check out the new tech stuff blog now on the
Speaker 1: house stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you