LWG Data Recovery

Tales from the Lab

Client:        National Insurance Carrier -SI Unit, Theft of Property Event:        An insurance claim was filed reporting that rare baseball cards were stolen from the insured's residence. The insured's claim was based on digital photos of the cards, submitted as proof of ownership. Fraud was suspected. Solution:        LWG CFS made an exact image of the insured's computer hard drive and searched the media for evidence, namely the presence of the supplied card images and other reported proof of ownership.  No proof of ownership was found and no record of the original card photos was found.  The findings resulted in additional investigation and dismissal of the claim.

Myth of the Month for March

The “Hit It” Myth

This may be the oldest of all. When the hard drive stops being detected, some people tap it with a screwdriver or something similar during boot.

We have already seen this “procedure” done with an old hard drive, and it was recognized in one of the attempts. The disk worked for some more hours and then stopped for good.

We have received some disks with marks and dents on the outside, due to dozens of “taps”.

We can’t forget that the distance between the read heads and the disk surface got shorter as time went by, and some modern disks (already discontinued – that’s lucky) used to let loose a part of the arm where we find the head parking and held it again when activated. It’s usual to find pieces of those heads spread inside disks whose user or technician used the “tap” solution. Those pieces scratch the disk in such a way that there’s no way to recover its data anymore. That’s why the “hit it” technique makes matters worse: before you could recover your data, but after having used it in disk of that type, the disk becomes totally irrecoverable.

Note, bottom line is hitting the drive may on very limited situations allow a drive to work, however it is MUCH MORE likely to cause severe if not terminal damage to your drive, therefore we do not recommend this.