Data Recovery Blog » How To

Backup Your Windows PC For Free

straywasp — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:45:36 +0000

It’s something we should all be doing but never seems important until it’s too late. I’m not talking about taking the dog for a walk or feeding the cat, I’m talking about backing up your PC. In the words of Joni Mitchell “You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.” How would you feel if you never saw your data again. Family photos, years worth of e-mails, documents, music and videos all gone in the blink of an eye. This is usually where we come in with our data recovery process. But there is an alternative. Lifehacker has an excellent guide on using free software to backup your PC. The only prerequisite is that you purchase an external hard disk of sufficient storage capacity.

For Mac users there is a totally different process. If you are running Leopard (10.5) then take a look at Time Machine. (More on this in a future post)

Checkout Lifehacker for all the details

Disk Warrior versus Data Recovery

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:10:00 +0000

Disk warrior has long been a favoured utility used by mac support companies and enthusiasts to analyse and repair Macintosh volumes. It is favoured mainly for it’s simplicity and many features including data recovery.
As a data recovery company we have received many mac hard drives from clients who had previously used Disk Warrior to attempt to gain access to their data.
In some cases the particular hard drive being examined was too severely damaged for Disk Warrior to be of any use. In other cases Disk Warrior was used but the data left afterwards was corrupt and not accessible.
This article is to hopefully make people aware of the downside to using a powerful utility such as this, especially when your lost data is critical to you.
The problem is not so much the utility itself, but the lack of a users understanding of how powerful this utility is. This is a quote used on Alsoft’s website that can be misleading.

“ Simply click the rebuild button and Disk Warrior goes to work ”

In any data loss situation writing to the hard drive that has your lost data is something that should never be carried out, as it is this writing process that can do more damage that good. Disk Warrior uses this process when rebuilding mac volume structures and in cases when it gets it wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic for the end user. It often results in the rebuilt data left behind being damaged and not accessible.

We recommend that you read the documentation that comes with the utility carefully and fully understand it’s capabilities.

How to Fix a 5G iPod When it Starts Skipping Tracks

straywasp — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:11:00 +0000

A simple way to fix a skipping iPod 5G

We recently received a white 5G iPod for repair. The problem with this iPod seemed fairly simple. After loading tracks from a windows version of iTunes, the songs would appear in the list as usual, but after playing one or two songs the iPod would stop playing and appear to skip through the rest of the songs. We have seen this sort of issue before, when songs have gone into the iTunes Library but never copy correctly over to the iPod. We confirmed that this was not the case as we were using a fresh iTunes install with only one album in the library.

Another issue we see is when the iPod’s system area becomes corrupt and therefore causes problems playing music. We removed the Toshiba hard drive from the iPod and performed a complete write process on the drive to remove all partition and data information. As a matter of interest we decided to restore the iPod on a Macintosh computer. When we added the sample songs, all was good. They played correctly and we thought problem solved. We had to restore the iPod on a Windows PC to give back to the customer, so we carried out the restore and added some sample tracks. Unexpectedly we were back in the same situation again. The songs would initially start to play but then skip around all over the place. Next on our list of possible fixes were iPod diagnostic modes. These are accessed on this iPod using the following process:

Toggle hold switch on (red) then off (white)
Hold down the menu and center (select) button for a few seconds to reset the iPod
Once the white apple logo appears, press and hold center (select) button and previous (<<) button
From this secret menu we tried a full test (be aware that testing the SDRAM took around 20-30 minutes and shows no activity until it is finished)

These test all passed with flying colours so it was back to the drawing board. Thinking back to the fact that the iPod worked fine when it was Macintosh formatted we decided to try a firmware downgrade. All we had to do was choose a firmware from the list and load it onto our iPod. We tried 2005-11-17 which contains firmware version 1.0 for the 5G iPods. We did have to plug the iPod into the PC and then eject it from the taskbar before the restore utility would work.

Since downgrading the iPod it has worked flawlessly and been playing music non-stop. Apple appears to be ignoring this problem instead of providing an update or even recommending this downgrade option. Hopefully this little guide will save a few iPods from the scrap heap and maybe even provoke a response from the big A. We will have to wait and see what Firmware 1.3 brings.