(at the intersection of Ventura Blvd and Tujunga Ave):
Jan 29, 2011 - We have moved... about a mile down the street :)
In order to keep up with increasing demand for affordable data recovery, we have moved to a larger retail location! For drop off recoveries, we now accept walk-ins, no appointment necessary. We can now handle more simultaneous recoveries while keeping the same fast turnaround we've always provided.
P.S. Recovered 100% from two RAID 5 rigs last week! The first was a 5-drive Seagate Black Armor NAS RAID with two bad drives. The second RAID was a 4-drive mix of various Western Digital enterprise drives. Both were recovered in less then a week, 99.9-100% successful, and at $300/drive -- cost less than any other data recovery company by a long shot.
December 1, 2011 - November Was a Record Setting Month!
Busier than ever at $300 Data Recovery! Over 60 drives successfully recovered in November! More and more mail-in drives have been coming in from all over the country; including Flordia, Maryland, New York, Michigan, Texas, and Ohio. Keep sending them in, we'll keep recovering!
September 29, 2011
Lately I've been doing a lot of recoveries for other computer repair shops. The word is starting to spread; from Florida to New York to Oregon, computer shop owners across the country are starting to see the benefits of $300 Data Recovery.
Rather than referring clients to Drive Savers or OnTrack, which most people can't afford, they are sending their client's drives to me to see what data is recoverable before sending to the expensive guys.
There are two ways this usually pans out: either they handle all the work of packing, shipping, and communicating with $300 Data Recovery (and therefore charge their clients a little extra to make it worth their time) or they are referring their clients to me directly.
P.S. Success rates on certain drives have greatly improved due to a major update recently released for one of my data recovery systems (PC3000).
July 30, 2011 - Twitter
I don't have a link to it on the main page (yet), but you can see data recovery updates and read other tidbits by following me on twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/300datarecovery.
May 8, 2011 - Listen to $300 Data Recovery on the Computer America radio show
Last Wednesday night I spoke with Carey Holzman for an hour long interview about my $300 Data Recovery services. Carey Holzman is the co-host of the longest running live syndicated radio show about computers, Computer America. Learn more about my capabilities and hear answers to various questions about data recovery. You can download and listen to the entire interview by clicking here.
April 25, 2011 - March = Best Month So Far!
March was the busiest and most successful month so far with over 50 hard drives successfully recovered. Word of mouth, online ratings, and more advanced data recovery tools/techniques are all responsible for the increased success.
To keep things busy, I just started a Facebook page for $300 Data Recovery. If you're on Facebook, please visit (and "Like") my page. I'm new to Facebook, so let me know if there is anything else I can do to make my page better.
I'd like to take a moment to thank all my Fans and past clients for continuing to spread the word about $300 Data Recovery!! I owe much of my success to past clients who were so happy with my work (and price!) that they wrote about it online or told their friends. You all rock!!
January 25, 2011 - A Busy New Year!
Things are getting busier around here this year. That means updates to "success stories" may be fewer and farther between. But, there have already been some notable stories this year:
• I started working/sub-contracting with a data recovery company in Denmark (Recoverit). They were getting too busy and needed help with their workload. So far I've received three drives from them, each with different and complex problems. I was able to recover 100% of two of them (bad PCB and very bad firmware/translator problem). The third drive appears to have a bad head(s), which I don't repair. Excited to have more drives from them soon.
• I recently did two RAID recoveries: both 2 x 2gb RAID-0. I recovered 100% for both clients, one a photographer, the other a film editor. Both RAIDs were from different brand enclosures (G-raid & CalDigit) but suffered from the same problem: corrupt RAID controller. Both drives had to be manually re-striped (I re-created the RAID). The G-raid had an added issue of a corrupt partition so the re-striped drive also needed to be thoroughly scanned before the data could be recovered.
• I've recently upgraded my computer's interfaces with eSata and USB 3 for even faster data copying speeds. This means my already fast-turnaround time (24-48 hour average), just got faster!
November 9, 2010 - Two ZIF Recoveries Collide
Last week I received two 1.8" ZIF drives (the kind of drives used in iPods and MacBook Airs). The first was mailed in from a small computer repair company in Montana, pulled from a PC laptop.
After hooking up the hard drive and powering on, the drive immediately started clicking. I noticed that the PCB felt hotter than normal and thought that could be the problem (as opposed to "bad heads"). I immediately went searching around the 'net and contacted computer part hoarders for a replacement PCB. Unfortunately, a few days went by and an identical replacement was nowhere to be found.
A few days later, I got a MacBook Air data recovery drop-off. This drive had lots of bad sectors. With my data recovery hardware tools, I was able to quickly recover 99.9% of the data off the drive.
As luck would have it, the MacBook Air hard drive and the mail-in hard drive just happened to be the exact same model (hard drive and PCB). So, while hoping the PCB was in fact the problem, I swapped the original PCB for the donor PCB. It worked! There was no more clicking and I was able to recover 100% of the data back to my client.
September 26, 2010 - Western Digital MyBook RAID Mess
AES dropped off two Western Digital 4tb MyBook hard drives which were RAIDed together (using Mac's Disk Utility) and no longer mounting. They contained all the important day-to-day data the company's more than 100 employees needed to work.
One drive seemed okay (it appeared in Disk Utility as a RAID slice), but the other didn't show up at all. To make matter's worse, each 4tb drives was in reality two 2tb drives, stripe-RAIDed internally in the MyBook enclosure.
I discovered one drive in the "bad" enclosure which had firmware problems (in particular, the RBBList and a few more modules were corrupt). Luckily, since all the drives were almost identical, I was able to save the RBBList from one of the "donors" and upload it onto the problem drive. This allowed the drive to spin up correctly and become "ready."
The drive was moved to a DeepSpar Disk Imager (after mapping the heads of the drive) and cloned for about 20 hours. About .01% of the drive was too damaged to recover -- mostly in the first 1% of the drive -- probably due to media damage on the platter. After the clone was complete, I moved the cloned drive back into the MyBook enclosure, and powered on both drives to see if the RAID was recognized.
Two MyBook 4tb Drives, RAIDed (with fan on top)
It wasn't. At least not by Disk Utility. Luckily my data recovery software was able to easily recreate the RAID and find all the missing files (with folder structure still in tact). I immediately began moving the data onto an external drive.
Just 4% into the recovery, things slowed to a halt. After listening closely to the 4 hard drives, I heard a faint clicking in the supposedly "good" enclosure. I removed and tested the two drives, it was clear that one also had bad sectors. 10 hours later, after imaging the second "bad" drive, I had a 100% clone.
Once again I hooked the drives up to my data recovery software and restarted the recovery process. 60 hours later everything was successfully recovered and moved onto a new external hard drive! Over 99.9% of the missing data was recovered and the employees at AES could get back to work.
September 25, 2010 - Completely Dead Hitachi Drive
A new client setup an online appointment for data recovery and left this in the notes section: "Originally, platters would not spin. Swapped logic board, platters will spin but HD not recognized by BIOS." This had me a little worried. If everything was done correctly with the PCB swap, and the drive was not recognized, it could mean internal damage. However, since I know that PCB swapping is usually NOT an easy process of simply swapping boards, I had a feeling I'd get lucky.
The drive was indeed dead upon initial inspection, and the logic board (PCB) was to blame. However, when he dropped it off, I asked if the PCB he originally swapped was an identical donor. It wasn't. This meant that his previous PCB swap couldn't have worked.
Luckily, I already had an identical PCB donor in stock. However, with most modern drives, simply swapping the PCB in this case wouldn't work. I also needed to move the ROM chip from the old/dead PCB to the donor.
After swapping PCBs and ROM chips, the drive spun up and was recognized as expected. There were no other errors or bad sectors on the drive, so I was able to immediately start moving my client's data to his external drive. All the data was recovered and ready in just 5 hours of dropping off!
September 16, 2010 - Ran over PowerBook G4
Today I got this PowerBook which was accidently run over by a car! The whole computer was crushed, bent, cracked -- completely broken:
The drive itself, once removed, would not mount on a Mac. I could tell just by listening to the drive that it had internal media damage -- the drive was much louder than it should be and would click when reaching bad spots.
Next step in this case was to hook the drive up to my Deepspar Data Recovery Imager. After a few hours of imaging the drive I had successfully cloned more than 99.9% of the data on the bad drive to one of my good drives.
I then hooked and scanned the cloned drive using one of my data recovery rigs which revealed all the files and folders needing to be recovered. I quickly moved all the data to a client supplied external hard drive.
Even though the PowerBook was a total loss -- my client's data was back in her hands, safe and sound!
August 14, 2010 - Beatles' DJ Needs Help!
Chris Carter, host of Breakfast with the Beatles on KLOS, called today to ask about data recovery. One of his first questions was, "My drive is clicking, do you have a clean room?" I explained that I don't, but that "clicking" doesn't always mean a clean room is necessary for data recovery--in fact, only about 20% of the hard drives I get actually need a clean room. In addition, I told him that he'd only pay the $300 flat fee if I could get back data he wanted. Chris decided to drop off his hard drive a couple hours later.
Chris' Western Digital drive was definitely suffering from the "click of death." However, I managed to overcome the "clicks" and mount the drive using special data recovery hardware. After the drive was fully spinning and initialized, I recovered all of the important data first, then went back and recovered everything else off the drive.
Since Chris was on a PC and wanted his computer fixed, I referred him to Garrett Brown with The Tech Lab Company who migrated the recovered data to a new internal hard drive with a fresh Windows installation. If you listened to the August 15th show, you heard him mention Garrett and me --Success!
August 11, 2010 - Miami Beach Mail-in
Two days ago I received this e-mail from Denis Doric of Miami's Doric Corporation:
| "I need data recovery on a hard-drive, I have tried Best Buy and Staples, they can't do it. I have also mailed it into a company and they said it would have to be taken into a clean room. Do you deal with cases like this?" |
I told Denis that I'd be happy to try and if I couldn't recover the data, I could refer him to a reasonably priced clean room. He agreed and shipped his drive the next day.
I got the drive early today and began working on it immediately. It soon became evident that several areas of the drive had severe media damage (causing the drive to click). Using a data recovery hardware imager, I was able to disable the head on the platter containing the problem sectors. This allowed me to copy all the good data off his drive quickly. Then I worked on recovering the damaged sectors on the problem platter by using special read methods on the drive.
After about 5-6 hours, I'd successfully cloned 99% of his damaged hard drive to one of my drives. The file system remained damaged and required several more hours of scanning using data recovery software. By the end of the night, all the important data was saved. It was sent back to Miami the next day on a brand new portable external hard drive. Success!
July 20, 2010 - MacBook Air Takes a Dip
I got a call from a Mac repair client in need of data recovery when his son accidently dropped his MacBook Air in the pool (the same MacBook Air I'd tuned-up just a few months back). After taking his computer to a local Mac shop who said the data was irrecoverable, he called me to schedule a drop-off.
The MacBook Air looked bad! Clearly it had been completely submerged in the pool: watermarks covered the entire case. The logic board inside the housing was a mess, the computer was a totally ruined, but the hard drive actually looked pretty good.
The MacBook Air's 1.8" hard drive uses a rare "ZIF" interface. Luckily, I had an adapter for it, and, after cleaning the PCB, I hooked it up to one of my data recovery hardware tools. After mapping the heads, and performing some preliminary tasks to ensure a successful recovery, I began cloning the bad drive to one of my good ones. After a few hours I had an exact clone of the bad drive.
The cloned drive still suffered from file system damage -- but after a quick scan using data recovery software, all of the data was found with filenames and folder structure still intact. The recovered data was moved to an external drive, ready to be migrated to a new Mac. Success!