Data Recovery

Hard drives fail all the time. Eventually your hard drive will fail and your data
will no longer be available. Ron Austin of
Action Front Data Recovery Labs
joins the geeks for a discussion on how data can be recovered from “dead” hard drives.

Data Recovery is the process of getting data off of a hard drive or some other storage media when the media has become unavailable. It is essential that you do regular backups of your data, because your media will eventually fail.

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Vice Presedent of Marketing and Business Development at
Action Front Data Recovery Labs,
Ron Austin holds a BA in Computer Science from York University and
graduated with distinction. Ron began his IT career as a programmer/analyst
then moved into sales, marketing and eventually general management gaining
many years experience at the senior executive level of technology companies
including serving as President & CEO of Globelle Corporation before it was sold
to Tech Data Corporation.Ron has written two Data Emergency Guides that tell you what to do
and what NOT to do when you experiance data problems.

Every week we cover a bit of the Geek news.

Sean- Video Game Ban lifted
John- BugBear Virus
Miles- Microsoft patches to be better
Dedi- Apple, Indeependint Music
Miles- Real Life – counter strike
Dedi- Final Cut Pro Version 4
Lyle- Apple Dropes Powerbook prices in a move to increase their laptop business.
Sean- Small Hard Drives

Jeffery Los Gatos What is the Windows Update to Patch “BugBear Virus” volnurability? To protect your self from this new virus go to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS01-027, read the bulletin and install the patch. You need this patch if you are running Windows with Internet Explorer 5.01 and 5.5. Jeffery recomended using a second harddrive as a backup. The guest and the Geeks agreed, but exterimaly important documents should be backed up and taken to a second phisical location. Ted Corralitos Ted Emailed us and asked: Hi Guys, It’s Ted from Corralitos again, can’t get to a phone right now… I am wondering if I do something like

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
and write NULLs to my hard drive, say just one pass… Is it possible
to recover the data I just “wiped”?

Ron sais no, but Miles recomends writing random data, not just nulls. Also two or more passes, for the paranoid, is helpful. Zoe Monterey Can you recover data from a reformated hard drive? You can recover from a high-level format (quick pass), but not from the, less common, low-level platform.