Hard Drive Recovery Service
Alandata's Hard Drive Recovery Service recovers data others cannot..
Alandata specializes in data recovery, with an emphasis in Linux, RAID and NAS storage devices. One thing that sets Alandata apart from most data recovery services is that Alandata is an innovator of data recovery, techniques, methods and programs. We don't just push buttons and run programs. We write our own programs. To do that you must have complete understandings of the inner workings of the target.
An example of this is our RAID recovery tool-set COPYRAID. This was one of the first tools specifically built for RAID recovery. Knowing the system and being able to create our own tools gives us the ability to recover where others fail. Recently we received a 10x500gb RAID array - thats 5 terabytes of data. It had been to a major national data recvoery company ESSdatarecovery. After a month they returned it as unrecoverable. I went to work on it and analyzed. It was a linux filesystem and it appeared that all the pieces were there - but it would never line-up properly. I wrote special diagnostic routines to hunt down known markers. I detyermined that it was supposed to be a RAID-50. A RAID-50 is 2 RAID-5's blended together. What I discovered was that the Intel RAID controller was flawed - it didnt write the data in any kind of normal pattern - it was corrupt but fixable. I then wrote special code to extract the data from the mutant raid and recovered 100% of the data, with names and paths - perfect.
Another recent example was a Recovery I did for IBM and a large University Medical center. They had a 1.5 terabyte partition that was accidentally reformatted and partially over-written. That is a partially recoverable situation. The hard part was that the file-system was a linux GFS partition. This is a "Global File System" that is meant to be accessed by many servers cooperatively over the network (even internet). GFS is so new that there are no recovery tools for it. So I had to analyze, study and develop the tools to recover it. I succeeded with 97% of the files recovered with names and paths.
Alandata Services: Data Recovery Solution Developer Linux filesystems experts in Ext3, Ext2, UFS1, UFS2, BSD, AIX, XFS, Reiser We wrote data recovery utilities to recover ext2, ext3, UFS1, XFS
Hard drive Data Recovery: Hard drives fail in the following ways: Media errors: When drives start to fail they usually start to get unreadable areas. Users may notice that their computer seems to hang or act sluggish. These errors are hidden by the operating system. The disk-drive itself will do 16 retries. Then the OS may do 8 more retries so after 128 attempts it will either read the block or report an error. So your OS hides the drive problems from you until catastrophe occurs. Electronic failures - bad boards and heads. Mechanical Failures, seized bearings, crashed heads. Service Area corruption. DIsk drives have hidden areas containing critical tables required by the drive to operate. They can become unreadable. Password removal - is your drive locked? we can unlock most password protected drives. Bulk Secure Erasure - do you have hundreds of drives that need to be securely erased before reuse? Conversions - have old tapes, cartridges, Magneto Optical devices that you want to saved on a hard drive? Forensic Analysis - We can analyze your drives. Forensic CLoning - need secured, authorized copies of hard drives? We can readonly copy your drives and provide MD5 hash-reports to confirm their state. Flash Memory Device recovery. RAID - We wrote the book on RAID - I believe we wrote the first RAID recovery toolkit 25 years ago. Most of our RAIDs come from other DR companies. Filesystems: We are experts in well nearly all file-systems there are. FAT, FAT32, MAC-HFS, Linux-EXT, XFS, GFS, UNIX''s: BSD, UFS, SCO, HPUX, AIX