Some Fix Problems, Others Cause Them

(Please also read this fol­low-up to my expe­ri­ence with WeRecoverData.com)

Final­ly some good news in my ongo­ing hard dri­ve dra­ma. After remov­ing the Sea­gate dri­ve from the Acom­da­ta enclo­sure and plac­ing it into a new enclo­sure (a Macal­ly, if any­one cares) the hard dri­ve that I lost dur­ing the wind-and-rain­storm here Jan­u­ary 4^th is now back online. I’ve already told Pho­to­shop to use it as the scratch disk and start­ed Pho­to­shop open­ing the magen­ta chan­nel of my lat­est project. It’s still going to be a long process, but hope­ful­ly there won’t be so much of the wait­ing an hour and a half for a process to die when the scratch disk fills. Wait­ing an hour and a half to process an image I can take. Wait­ing not to process an image is frustrating.

Acom­da­ta

The saga began on Jan­u­ary 4^th of this year when San Fran­cis­co was hit with heavy rains and high winds. Being con­cerned about pow­er fail­ures, I dragged my unin­ter­rupt­able pow­er sup­ply upstairs, shut down my com­put­er, and plugged it in to the UPS.

In the process, the plug for my six-month-old exter­nal hard dri­ve got jig­gled and it lost pow­er for maybe a half a sec­ond. I was there­after nev­er able to mount the hard dri­ve or even see it evi­dence that it exist­ed (using DiskWar­rior, Apple’s Disk Util­i­ty or Acom­data’s soft­ware) again.

Odd­ly enough, the dri­ve appeared just fine as a device in the Sys­tem Pro­fil­er and in the USB Prober util­i­ty. But no dri­ve mount­ed or appeared as a dri­ve to be mount­ed. Well, that’s not entire­ly true, but I have to back up and tell you a lit­tle about the dri­ve’s eccen­tric­i­ties first.

This dri­ve had a fan­cy par­ti­tion and encryp­tion scheme to make it more secure. More on that lat­er, but when the dri­ve worked, two par­ti­tions would appear. First a small «CD part» that appeared to be a CD. This con­tained the soft­ware that would take your pass­word and unlock the disk for use. My first mis­take, then, was not refor­mat­ting the dri­ve and get­ting rid of the pass­word sys­tem first thing.

After the pow­er blip, only the «CD part» con­tain­ing the soft­ware appeared. If the pass­word soft­ware were run, I’d get an error stat­ing that no dri­ve was found.

This dri­ve had a lot of files on it. Expen­sive files that had not been backed up. First I went to Acom­data’s web­site look­ing for any kind of diag­nos­tic infor­ma­tion I could find. Acom­da­ta made me fill in all my vital sta­tis­tics includ­ing my dri­ve’s mod­el num­ber, ser­i­al num­ber, my home phone num­ber and address, just to get to the form that asked for my dri­ve’s mod­el num­ber, ser­i­al num­ber, my home phone num­ber and address to send a query to their tech­ni­cal sup­port depart­ment. I wrote a detailed descrip­tion of what I had tried to get the dri­ve to work, which at that point had not been any­thing extreme or warranty-voiding.

WeRecoverData.com

Sus­pect­ing that I should­n’t count on a speedy response from Acom­da­ta, I went look­ing for data recov­ery ser­vices. Since it seemed to me that prob­a­bly some­thing had just got­ten munged in the par­ti­tion table, that it would be an easy fix and that I’d end up pay­ing some­one a cou­ple hun­dred bucks for a half hour’s work. The place I chose is WeRecoverData.com, which adver­tis­es no rates but promis­es to return a quote in six to twen­ty-four hours. For a pre­mi­um, they offer faster turn­around. Though I did­n’t want to pay the pre­mi­um, I want­ed to get my files back bad­ly, so I went out on the motor­cy­cle in wind and rain so heavy that my rain pants were soaked through with­in min­utes (the dri­ve was safe inside a ziplock bag, and my mes­sen­ger bag does a sur­pris­ing­ly good job of keep­ing water out) to deliv­er the dri­ve to their offices immediately.

It was maybe one o’clock in the after­noon when I dropped the dri­ve off at WeRecoverData.com’s offices. They had me fill out a form and told me that I would hear back the next day.

I heard noth­ing on Sat­ur­day. Noth­ing on Sun­day. Mon­day morn­ing I got a phone call from Caitlin at WeRecoverData.com. She direct­ed me to an online form where I should input the infor­ma­tion about my case. She said that I would have to fill the form out online in order to start my case going. So they did not have a quote for me, they did­n’t even con­sid­er me to be a cus­tomer yet. I explained that I had filled out a form (in pen with water­proof ink, just in case) in their office. She told me that she had that form, but that she need­ed the infor­ma­tion from the online form. I went and filled out the online form, which con­tained not just sim­i­lar fields, but pre­cise­ly the same fields as the form which I had been instruct­ed to fill out in their office.

So OK, I fig­ured I should­n’t com­plain too much about sav­ing her the work of typ­ing in my infor­ma­tion, so I did it and emailed her back let­ting her know that I had. At 8:36 AM Mon­day, she con­firmed that I had a case num­ber and let me know that my dri­ve was on its way to the lab. Maybe this is when the 24 hours starts? I thought. And I wait­ed for 8:36 on Tuesday.

At 11:00 AM on Wednes­day I got email from Monique at WeRe­cover­Da­ta say­ing that the tech­ni­cians had looked at the dri­ve, deter­mined that they could prob­a­bly retrieve the data, and that it would cost me $1600. No descrip­tion of the dam­age, no men­tion of what they would do to retrieve the data or whether the dri­ve itself could be sal­vaged. I respond­ed by email at that time that I was dis­ap­point­ed that “six to twen­ty-four» hour ser­vice meant get­ting need­less delays and days of wait­ing, and that I was not inclined to give $1600 of my busi­ness to them.

I nev­er received any reply from Monique, so on Fri­day I placed a tele­phone call to WeRe­cover­Da­ta and left voice­mail with my case num­ber and a brief run­down of events and the fact that I want­ed to get my dri­ve back. A few hours lat­er I did get a return call from a guy who asked me if my objec­tion had been the price. There are only two ways the con­ver­sa­tion can go from there: either the sales­droid would tell me about all the bril­liant tech­ni­cians and expen­sive equip­ment that would be used to retrieve my data, there­by jus­ti­fy­ing the price, or else he would start try­ing to nego­ti­ate a price that I would say yes to.

Either way, by then I sim­ply had no inter­est. Today I’m a lit­tle curi­ous whether they quote high to gouge those that can afford it and then come down on the price for any­one that balks. If that is the case, I’m inter­est­ed to know how low they would have gone, but it’s pure­ly curios­i­ty. At the time I told the guy my sto­ry of six-to-twen­ty-four busi­ness hour turn­around (where one week­day is eight hours) and of hav­ing to refill forms and suf­fer delays caused by my fol­low­ing the instruc­tions I was giv­en in their office. I told him that if I’d been informed up front about the actu­al time I prob­a­bly would­n’t have had a prob­lem with it, but since it was not what I was promised that I did not want to do busi­ness with his company.

The guy on the phone informed me that Monique had been out sick Thurs­day and Fri­day. I felt a lit­tle bad get­ting huffy about some­one being out sick, but that had been only the past two days of the sev­en day sto­ry, so I told him that Monique had seemed like a nice per­son and that I hoped that she felt bet­ter real­ly soon but that if his com­pa­ny was going to promise six-to-twen­ty-four hour quotes that they should con­sid­er a sys­tem where oth­er peo­ple in the office take on the projects that the sick per­son leaves behind.

Anoth­er week lat­er, the dri­ve arrived at my mailbox.

Acomdata, again

It occurred to me then that I’d nev­er heard any­thing from Acom­da­ta. So I went through jump­ing through all the hoops to send anoth­er mes­sage to tech­ni­cal sup­port, this time stat­ing that I was irate from not get­ting a return call or email from my sup­port request two weeks prior.

I got not a peep from them. It is now almost three months since my first sup­port request. Luck­i­ly, I did­n’t wait to hear from Acom­da­ta. I took the actu­al dri­ve (a run-of-the-mill Sea­gate) out of the enclo­sure and put it in the tow­er-case work­sta­tion at the office where I work and went to start find­ing the prob­lem myself. My first thought was to use the mir­a­cle soft­ware that I see rec­om­mend­ed any time any prob­lem occurs with a hard dri­ve on a Mackertosh.

Alsoft’s DiskWarrior

For­tu­nate­ly, I bought DiskWar­rior a cou­ple of years ago. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that ver­sion stopped work­ing with OS X 10.5. For­tu­nate­ly, they offer a paid upgrade to the next full ver­sion or a free upgrade to a point-revi­sion that was patched to work with the new­er ver­sion of the OS.

Here’s where things get sticky. Alsoft does­n’t like the idea that their cus­tomers might be steal­ing soft­ware from them. So they don’t just let any­one down­load their soft­ware. When you pay them, they send you a down­load link that lets you run the soft­ware local­ly, but for the real ben­e­fit of the soft­ware, you have to wait for the CD to arrive because it’s the CD that lets you boot to the CD and there­fore look at your sys­tem disk while it’s not busy per­form­ing sys­tem tasks.

When you upgrade, you don’t get that first down­load of soft­ware you can install on your machine and run against any dri­ve oth­er than your sys­tem dri­ve. Instead Alsoft sends a pro­gram that looks at the orig­i­nal CD, makes some adjust­ments in its own mem­o­ry, and then burns a brand new CD for you which can then be used either to boot from or to copy the soft­ware from onto your local dri­ve. I’d been through this pro­ce­dure with ear­li­er upgrades from them. When I went to find my orig­i­nal install CD, it was nowhere to be found. I have the bootable CD that I made from doing this same process the last time, but that’s not good enough. In order to get the free updates, you have to phys­i­cal­ly still have the orig­i­nal CD.

I thought about just buy­ing the new ver­sion. I would have, but for two things.

First, was­n’t that my mis­take the first time around? I bought soft­ware from a com­pa­ny that employs pira­cy coun­ter­mea­sures that incon­ve­niences their cus­tomers. They took their loss­es from soft­ware pira­cy and trans­ferred those loss­es to their pay­ing cus­tomers in the form of lost hours of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Alsoft of course has every right to pro­tect their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty in any way they see fit. I, like­wise, have the right to pro­tect my con­ve­nience, time, and effort by not doing busi­ness with com­pa­nies that cost me those things. So why make that mis­take twice, effec­tive­ly giv­ing Alsoft a bonus for mak­ing my life more difficult?

Sec­ond, I’m still not sure what DiskWar­rior does that OS X’s Disk Util­i­ty does­n’t already do. I trust that it does some­thing, but I’m not ready to pay for some­thing that I can’t see the ben­e­fit of. DiskWar­rior does not repair par­ti­tion tables, so it almost cer­tain­ly was not going to help me.

Stellar Phoenix to the rescue

I did try out the demo ver­sion of some data recov­ery soft­ware called Stel­lar Phoenix. Stel­lar Phoenix’s crip­pled demo showed me all my files, but would­n’t copy them until I paid. Now that’s some­thing that makes sense. When I gave them my $129, I was con­fi­dent that their soft­ware would work for me, because the demo had proven itself. $129 was the price of my data recov­ery, not a gam­ble on data recov­ery. Of course things could still go wrong, but see­ing my files through Stel­lar Phoenix’s demo made it a good bet.

Stel­lar Phoenix does­n’t actu­al­ly repair hard dri­ves. Instead it retrieves files from dri­ves that are dam­aged. So my plan once I got the soft­ware was to copy every­thing off the dri­ve, refor­mat it, and copy every­thing back. Then take the dri­ve off of the IDE cable in my clien­t’s com­put­er, put it back into the enclo­sure, bring it back home and copy my files onto the hard dri­ve here, where­after I could go about decid­ing what to back up, what to keep, what to throw away, etc.

The first issue I dis­cov­ered with this plan was that there was more data on the downed dri­ve than was free on the hard dri­ve in the office. I con­sid­ered shut­tling anoth­er exter­nal dri­ve back and forth, but when the sec­ond exter­nal dri­ve proved flaky, I decid­ed to make the choic­es about which files to sim­ply delete before bring­ing the files home. I end­ed up cut­ting a lit­tle deeply into the files I was on the fence about whether to keep, but I got all of the files I real­ly wanted.

About 20 hours of copy­ing files lat­er, I took the dri­ve out of the work­sta­tion, put it back into the orig­i­nal enclo­sure, plugged it in to the Mac and… nothing.

This time, not even the «CD part» appeared. I took the dri­ve across the room and plugged it into a Win­dows machine. The Win­dows machine saw only a CD dri­ve, but prompt­ed me to insert a disk when I tried to look at the disk. Once again, Win­dows’s Device Man­ag­er told me about the exis­tance of both a CD and a hard dri­ve, but I was unable to get at the hard drive.

In ret­ro­spect, I prob­a­bly should have plugged the dri­ve into the Win­dows machine ear­li­er. Part of the prob­lem was prob­a­bly in the pass­word-pro­tec­tion on the dri­ve. If I’d used the soft­ware that came on the dri­ve, I believe I could have dis­abled the pass­word pro­tec­tion. As it was, I’d just erased the pro­vid­ed software.

My best guess is that the dri­ve was par­ti­tioned with a large and small par­ti­tion, and that elec­tron­ics in the enclo­sure would tell the com­put­er that there were two sep­a­rate devices, get the data from one par­ti­tion and pro­vide it as read-only data as though it were a CD, and hide the oth­er par­ti­tion entire­ly until the soft­ware on the small­er par­ti­tion were run. When I repar­ti­tioned and refor­mat­ted the dri­ve, the elec­tron­ics in the enclo­sure still report­ed the devices the same way, but there was no longer any data from the first par­ti­tion to pass on to the faux CD-ROM it pre­tend­ed to be.

I still don’t know exact­ly what hap­pened to the dri­ve ini­tial­ly, but I sus­pect that the abil­i­ty for the enclo­sure to pass data from the larg­er par­ti­tion to the host machine was sim­ply fried. Per­haps there’s a USB hub inside the enclo­sure that cre­ates the illu­sion of two devices and one of those inter­faces was burned out. An actu­al hub should have been vis­i­ble in the USB Probe or even in Sys­tem Pro­fil­er, but I don’t have a bet­ter idea.

Since I knew I could read and write to the dri­ve direct­ly through the ATA inter­face, I went out and picked up a new enclo­sure. Ten min­utes after walk­ing in the door with the new enclo­sure I was copy­ing files back to my hard dri­ve here at home. Hap­py end­ing! Turns out ATA enclo­sures are not as com­mon as they once were, so I end­ed up pay­ing a lit­tle more for the only ATA enclo­sure that was in the store, which has an inte­grat­ed two-port USB hub and a 7‑in‑1 card read­er. For $10 more, I fig­ure a cou­ple more ports can’t hurt, and I can keep my portable card read­er in the lap­top bag (or per­haps a cam­era bag after I get one) where it belongs and always know where it is. Besides, pay­ing the $10 meant not buy­ing a tank of gas to go all the way down the penin­su­la to anoth­er com­put­er parts store open on Sundays.

Here’s one final piece of infor­ma­tion that has not escaped me. If the Stel­lar Phoenix soft­ware was able to read all my files, Acom­data’s claim that the dri­ve was encrypt­ed is with­out ques­tion false adver­tis­ing. The pass­word pro­tec­tion on an Acom­da­ta dri­ve can be eas­i­ly cir­cum­vent­ed by remov­ing the dri­ve from the enclo­sure and using anoth­er ATA cable. This should be good news for prac­ti­tion­ers of indus­tri­al espi­onage everywhere.

Of these three com­pa­nies men­tioned in my title, Alsoft is the least guilty. They haven’t done any­thing real­ly wrong, except in the cap­i­tal­ist free-mar­ket sense that incon­ve­nienc­ing your cus­tomers is a bad idea. WeRecoverData.com want­ed to charge me $1600 for some­thing that I, with no train­ing in data recov­ery, accom­plished with a screw­driv­er and $130 of freely avail­able soft­ware. Grant­ed, it took me a good thir­ty hours, but most of that time was just spent watch­ing files copy (time I put to good use on oth­er tasks) or find­ing cables that I had­n’t used in years and need­ed to get out of stor­age. They’re price-gougers, pure and sim­ple. Of course, if they had a real crashed hard dri­ve that they need­ed to have its plat­ters removed and exam­ined sec­tor-by-sec­tor to find hints of data, that might be a cheap price. I’m will­ing to believe that I sim­ply reached for an ele­phant gun to swat a fly, but there was no cause to esti­mate that high for a dri­ve that had this lit­tle wrong with it. Their fail­ure to live up to their adver­tised turn­around or even pro­vide me with notice that they’d be unable to do so elim­i­nates any slack I might oth­er­wise be will­ing to cut them. I’m a pret­ty easy­go­ing guy. You make a phone call or an email and let me know that you can’t make the dead­line, I usu­al­ly don’t have a prob­lem there. You sim­ply ignore the promis­es you make to your cus­tomers and you don’t deserve to be in business.

The real spe­cial con­tempt here is reserved for Acom­da­ta. First for sell­ing a con­sumer device with a con­vo­lut­ed val­ue-add of quite dubi­ous val­ue. It’s easy enough to pass­word-pro­tect a hard dri­ve these days, no mat­ter what oper­at­ing sys­tem you use. Why any­one would want this sil­ly pass­word-pro­tec­tion scheme is beyond me. The fact that their hard­ware is so frag­ile that a half-sec­ond loss of pow­er dam­aged the elec­tron­ics seems indica­tive of a fail­ure of man­u­fac­ture or design. Call­ing an unen­crypt­ed pass­word sys­tem that can be cir­cum­vent­ed with a screw­driv­er «encrypt­ed» or «secure» is fraud­u­lent. Refus­ing to respond to cus­tomer sup­port inquiries is rep­re­hen­si­ble, and since by exten­sion that is a refusal to hon­or the stat­ed war­ran­ty, I’d call that anoth­er count of fraud. If Acom­da­ta were a human being, they’d prob­a­bly be on their way to jail. Avoid doing busi­ness with this com­pa­ny at all costs.

Edit: I regret the phras­ing, «price-gougers, pure and sim­ple» regard­ing WeRecoverData.com. The «pure and sim­ple» mod­i­fi­er was intend­ed to soft­en the tone, but five months lat­er look­ing at it, I see it had the oppo­site effect. I meant to point out that the only thing they did wrong in pric­ing was aim high. It would have been bet­ter if I’d used a less point­ed word, but even with that word the phrase more accu­rate­ly con­vey­ing the tone might be, «price-gougers, that’s all». Imag­ine a shrug thrown in for good mea­sure. —SMS, 23 Octo­ber 2008