Hard Disk Recovery

  Recently it was my displeasure to work on a three drive spanned set for NT 4.0.  The set was soft configured so when the boot drive went down, with all of the configuration data for the RAID on it, the RAID would not mount.  In addition to that, this was a multi volume set.  In other words, there were two spanned sets within the three drives, staggered across all three drives. 

  Two problems existed with the RAID.  First, the spanned set, like most spanned sets had their starting points staggered.  Second, each set was staggered across the three drives.  If you are familiar with DELLs channelling system for configuring multiple physical devices using portions of each drive then you are familiar with this RAID handling scheme.  For those who are not familiar, here is how it works.

  As an example lets take three drives.  Each drive is 36 gigabytes in size.  For a spanned set you would normally take all of drive one, all of drive two, and all of drive three.  These drives would then be considered contiguous in the array.  In other words, you fill up drive one first, then drive two, then then last drive.  With this schema you can usually tell when you have a spanned set by mounting the first drive and taking a piece of data recovery software and treeing the drive up.  Since the Master File Table is at the beginning of a partition the recovery software will tree the drive as there are no drive seek and reads past the end of the first drive.  You can actually retrieve data from the first drive if all of the data resides on the first partition.  However, any data that is stored on either drive two or drive three will not be retrieved as you have only the first drive mounted.

  This configuration sounds a bit complicated.  That’s because it is.  It can be very difficult to decipher start and end points for the spanned sets where the entire dive is used for the span.  Now, add this little wrinkle.  The configuration not only has one spanned set, it has two.  So now you have six points of origin, six span chunk sizes, and two drive partitions with valid data.  What a mess.

  Next time I will have real numbers to use from a set I recovered and show you how you can recover your RAID with no RAID recovery software. 

Until next time…

By now everyone has some sort of MP3 digital music player such as an iPod. We have actually gotten quite a few in here for data recovery. An iPod or any other portable MP3 player for that matter uses solid state storage to store songs and video. Solid state data recovery is something that DTI data recovery has been doing since the beginning of digital storage.

Even though on Apple’s website they call the iPod’s storage a “hard drive”, not all of them are. The storage is for the most part flash media or solid state, not a drive with platters and heads. Some of the exceptions are the 60GB, 80GB and 120GB which use Toshiba hard drives. Look at the Apple site to see what is in your iPod. As far as data recovery goes, we have a lot more options when a hard drive is involved since they have working parts that can be fixed. Solid State Storage has no moving parts, but there are still plenty of things that we can do from an electronic level to perform iPod data recovery.

DTI Data has the capabilities to recover all files that reside on an iPod, music, pictures, video, etc.

Icon	Model	Year-Month introduced	Scrolling device	Capacity	Current iPod Software Version
	iPod shuffle (2nd generation Early 2008) (2 GB) data recovery	2008-02	n/a	2 GB	1.0.3
	iPod touch (32 GB) data recovery	2008-02	multi-touch display	32 GB	1.1.3
	iPod touch (8 GB or 16 GB) data recovery	2007-09	multi-touch display	8 GB or 16 GB	1.1.3
	iPod classic (80 GB or 160 GB) data recovery	2007-09	Click Wheel	80 GB or 160 GB	1.1.1
	iPod nano (3rd generation) data recovery	2007-09	Click Wheel	4 GB or 8 GB	1.1
	iPod shuffle (2nd generation) (1 GB) data recovery	2006-09	n/a	1 GB	1.0.3
	iPod (5th generation late 2006) (30 GB or 80 GB) data recovery	2006-09	Click Wheel	30 GB or 80 GB	1.2.3
	iPod nano (Second Generation) (2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB) data recovery	2006-09	Click Wheel	2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB	1.1.3
	iPod nano (1 GB) data recovery	2006-02	Click Wheel	1 GB	1.3.1
	iPod (5th generation) (60 GB) data recovery	2005-10	Click Wheel	60 GB	1.2.3
	iPod (5th generation ) (30 GB) data recovery	2005-10	Click Wheel	30 GB	1.2.3
	iPod nano (4 GB) data recovery	2005-09	Click Wheel	4 GB	1.3.1
	iPod nano (2 GB) data recovery	2005-09	Click Wheel	2 GB	1.3.1
	iPod with color display (60 GB) data recovery	2005-06	Click Wheel	60 GB	1.2.1
	iPod with color display (20 GB) data recovery	2005-06	Click Wheel	20 GB	1.2.1
	iPod photo (30 GB) (also known as iPod with color display) data recovery	2005-02	Click Wheel	30 GB	1.2.1
	iPod mini (4 GB Second Generation) data recovery	2005-02	Click Wheel	4 GB	1.4.1
	iPod mini (6 GB Second Generation) data recovery	2005-02	Click Wheel	6 GB	1.4.1
	iPod shuffle (512 MB) data recovery	2005-01	n/a	512 MB	1.1.5
	iPod shuffle (1 GB) data recovery	2005-01	n/a	1 GB	1.1.5
	iPod photo (40 GB) (also known as iPod with color display) data recovery	2004-10	Click Wheel	40 GB	1.2.1
	iPod photo (60 GB) (also known as iPod with color display) data recovery	2004-10	Click Wheel	60 GB	1.2.1
	iPod (20 GB Click Wheel) data recovery	2004-07	Click Wheel	20 GB	3.1.1
	iPod (40 GB Click Wheel) data recovery	2004-07	Click Wheel	40 GB	3.1.1
	iPod mini data recovery	2004-01	Click Wheel	4 GB	1.4.1
	iPod (20 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-09	touch wheel	20 GB	2.3
	iPod (40 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-09	touch wheel	40 GB	2.3
	iPod (10 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-04	touch wheel	10 GB	2.3
	iPod (15 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-04	touch wheel	15 GB	2.3
	iPod (30 GB dock connector) data recovery	2003-04	touch wheel	30 GB	2.3
	iPod (10 GB touch wheel) data recovery	2002-07	touch wheel	10 GB	1.5
	iPod (20 GB touch wheel) data recovery	2002-07	touch wheel	20 GB	1.5
	iPod (10 GB scroll wheel) data recovery	2002-03	scroll wheel	10 GB	1.5
	iPod (5 GB scroll wheel) data recovery	2001-10	scroll wheel	5 GB	1.5

If you are here you need data recovery, more than likely, internal hard disk repair. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form if you need data recovery.