It’s your worst nightmare. You don’t have a backup and your computer just died. And it had 5 years of contact information on it, 3 years of tax information, and other crucial financials that you can’t live without. Maybe you didn’t backup or maybe your backup is also bad. Whatever the case, you are incredibly stressed and your business is offline until you get this information back. I’ve had clients in this position, and let me tell you, it is no fun. This is especially painful if the company is big and it is bleeding money until the issue gets resolved. Suddenly, paying a lot of money for a service seems trivial. Before you start shelling out massive money, however, try a few simple things to see if you can get back up and running. Please note: if you are dealing with a complex server environment with multiple failure points, it’s probably best to get professionals in there ASAP to deal with the problem. This is especially true if you serve a large clientelle with online services. Time down is money in the drain.
If you are still running Windows 9x (gasp!) then you will need to obtain a boot floppy. This can be done easily from another 9x machine, or by visiting here. Simply start the machine with the floppy in the drive. When it comes to a prompt, type “chkdsk /F.” This will check the drive, including the physical surface of the drive, for errors. If you’re running Windows XP, boot your computer from your Windows XP CD. When you see a message to “press any key to boot from CD…”, press a key on your keyboard. This will start the XP installation. On the first screen, select “R” to enter the recovery console. It will ask you to login to your installation. After that you can type “chkdsk /F.”
If that still doesn’t work in XP, you still have hope. XP uses a journaling file system, NTFS. This allows you to restore to a previous state. Here’s how you do it. Shut off your computer. Turn it on and start hitting the F8 key every second. Do it really methodically. You will be greeted by the Window’s startup menu. Select “Safe Mode” from that list. You will see a bunch of strange text rolling on your screen that says something about “multidisk.” Don’t worry, that’s normal. When you are greeted with a yes/no prompt, select “no” to start the system restore feature. Now, restore your computer to a time when it worked. Reboot and cross your fingers.
If that doesn’t work or the computer can’t even see the hard drive, then it may be time to elist the services of a data recovery company. These companies utilize Class 100 clean rooms, similar to the one in the picture above. This keeps dust off of the drive platters when they open the drive. This allows the data recovery company to extract a raw image of the drive. Success rates are really high in these circumstances. And if your business is riding on it, it’s well worth the money.
Photo Source: Semiconductor Research Group, Texas Tech University
[tags]data recovery, data recovery strategies, data recovery companies, data recovery services[/tags]
Good article, alot of people when the computer goes down are in a panic.