Our Services

Notebook Data Recovery

If you would like to book in your media or receive a free quotation, please contact us.

1. Examples of Data Loss Situations
2. The Recovery Process
3. Recovery for Single Hard Drive
4. Turn-Around Time
5. Hard Drive Brands, Models and Interfaces
6. Operating Systems and File Systems
7. Preserving your Warranty

1. Examples of Data Loss Situations

Recovery from physical and logical damage due to mechanical and electrical failure, software corruption or human error.

• Dropped notebook - no longer turns on
• Inaccessible drives and partitions
• Applications that are unable to run or load data
• Corrupted data
• Virus
• Hard disk component failure
• Hard disk crashes
• Fire, water, coffee and other liquid damage
• Media surface contamination and damage
• Accidental reformatting of partitions
• Accidental deletion of data

2. The Recovery Process

Each data recovery, file recovery, undelete, raid recovery, disk recovery or disaster recovery case begins with a free evaluation to determine the potential for recovery and to provide a firm price-quote for your review. Initial diagnosis determines whether the media is accessible to our lab equipment. If so, the first priority is to create a raw image of the data so that logical analysis can determine the nature of the data loss situation. If the media is inaccessible our lab will test the components and closely examine its internal health to determine the extent of physical damage.

Recovery of crashed hard disks often involves replacing failed or damaged components in a clean environment and using specialized hardware and software tools to create the raw image. Failed components typically include electronics, read/write heads, head assemblies, magnets & drive motors.

Logical recovery uses the raw image by examining the low-level data sectors and determining what fixes to file system structures are needed to get access to the important data. Sometimes the existing file system structures are missing or damaged so much that data has to be extracted directly from one or more fragments of the raw image. Once a recovery has been successfully performed, file lists are created and data validity is checked.

3. Recovery for Single Hard Drive

Each data recovery case has its own unique characteristics. Based on the high volume of cases handled by Proactive Solutions we can classify most single hard drive recoveries into two broad categories: External and Internal.

External Cases: a) Physical: External electronic issues (example: replacing a bad PCB). Read errors. b) Logical (Drive is Functioning): Deleted files. File-system structures corrupted. These problems can be addressed without opening the HDA (Head Disk Assembly) of the drive. External cases can exceed this range if there is extreme corruption of the file-system or if the drive comes from a MAC system.

Internal Cases: Crashed heads. Motor problems. Contamination. These problems can only be addressed by opening the HDA (Head Disk Assembly) of the drive under clean room conditions. Internal cases exceeding this range include, for example, a 100GB SCSI drive requiring a high cost of parts. Drives from MAC systems may also exceed this range.

More Information about Pricing for Single Hard Drive Recoveries.

The actual price of any case is determined by two main factors:

• The cost of components.
• The total lab time spent on the case and what proportion of the work is done by junior, intermediate or senior technicians. In turn, the amount of lab time and seniority of staff needed are affected by:
  1. The File-system type. (Various Windows systems such as FAT32 and NTFS, MAC or UNIX)
  2. The degree of file-system rebuilding required. This is the amount of logical repair work required for an external recovery or as the follow-up steps for an internal recovery.

Other factors affecting the price quote are:

The historical lab success rate on a certain type of data loss situation on a particular model. Note that there is no charge at all if the data cannot be recovered; hence the costs involved in attempting the recovery are borne at our risk. Where we enjoy a higher probability of success (and thus lower risk) the price quote may be lower than those cases with a lower probability of success and higher risk.

Significant R&D is required to keep up with the technological developments in the drive industry. Pricing for newer data loss problems on newer models will be higher than the pricing for mainstream problems on more common models.

4. Turn-Around Time

We have geared its entire service to recover your data as fast as possible. When dealing with such a wide variety of problems, estimating time before the problem is diagnosed is difficult. That is why, each recovery case starts with a free evaluation.

The free evaluation is started immediately on receipt of the media and generally takes 2 to 24 hours to complete. The process involves several hours of work and testing. (Mirroring alone may take up to 24 hours of computer time with extensive re-tries for badly damaged devices.)

Complete recovery turn-around time including analysis and recovery is usually between 1 and 5 days. Some severe cases can take considerably more time.

Our hours of operation are 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday.

If you have an emergency situation, we have technical staff on call for weekends and after hours in all locations.

Time estimates are based on procedures and expertise required to recover the data you require. You are not charged by the hour. A firm quote is provided for your approval following the evaluation.

5. Hard Drive Brands, Models and Interfaces

We service all hard drive brands, models and interfaces. What follows is a comprehensive list. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call.

EIDE and IDE drives from all manufacturers including Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, IBM, Maxtor, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Conner, Micropolis, JTS, Digital, NEC, Compaq, Digital, Kalok, Fuji, Areal and JVC using 2.5" laptop & 3.5" Normal 40 pin ATA through to the UDMA6 interface.

SCSI drives from all manufacturers including Seagate, Quantum, IBM, Western Digital, Fujitsu, Digital, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Micropolis, Maxtor, CDC, Imprimis, Conner, Epson, Rodime, Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi and NEC using Normal SE, UW, Differential (WD), LVD, Hot Swappable (SCA) and 2.5" laptop interfaces.

Fibre Channel drives from Seagate and IBM with FC (1Gigabit Copper) interfaces.

ESDI, RLL & ST/MFM drives from all manufacturers including Seagate, Western Digital, Conner, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Miniscribe, Quantum, Tandon, Fuji, Toshiba, IBM, Kalok, Micropolis, Priam, Microscience, Tandon, JTS, Kyocera, LaPine and Tulin.

MCA drives from IBM, Western Digital and Seagate with IBM ST-506 & ESDI and 2.5" laptop ESDI interfaces.

PCMCIA Type I, II, III hard drives from IBM, Western Digital, Integral Peripherals and Procomm.

1.8" ATA-5 drives from Toshiba and Hitachi

CF+ Type II IBM Microdrives

6. Operating Systems and File Systems

Intel Platforms

Windows XP Professional and Home with NTFS, FAT32 or FAT16 file systems using standalone basic partitions or dynamic spanned, striped or fault-tolerant (RAID) volumes.

Windows 2000 Professional and Server with NTFS, FAT32 or FAT16 file systems using standalone basic partitions or dynamic spanned, striped or fault-tolerant (RAID) volumes.

Windows NT Workstation and Server with NTFS or FAT16 file systems using standalone, spanned, striped or fault-tolerant (RAID) volumes.

Windows ME, 98 / 95 with FAT32 or FAT16 filesystems.

MS-DOS and variants using 12 or 16 bit FAT file systems.

Compressed volume managers including Stacker, DoubleSpace & DriveSpace.

OS/2 with FAT and HPFS file systems.

Novell NetWare with FAT and NSS file systems using standalone, spanned, striped or fault-tolerant (RAID) volumes.

Unix Operating systems

SCO Open Server and Xenix

UnixWare from Novell and SCO

Solaris

Linux with ext2fs, xfs, reiserfs & jfs filesystems on standalone & RAID volumes

BSD-based systems such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, BSDI

LynxOS

QNX

Apple Macintosh

OS 9 with HFS and HFS+ file systems
OS X with HFS, HFS+ and Unix ufs file systems
All Macintosh hardware using SCSI, IDE & Firewire interfaces, including software RAID drivers such as SoftRaid & FWB Raid.

Unix Systems

Solaris on Sun/SPARC equipment, with ufs and Veritas VxFS file systems

HPUX on Hewlett-Packard workstations with hfs and Veritas VxFS file systems on standalone and LVM volumes

>IRIX on SGI workstations with efs and xfs file systems

VMS & OpenVMS running on Compaq & DEC equipment using ODS file systems

AIX on IBM RS/6000 with jfs file systems on LVM volumes

7. Preserving your Warranty

If the seals on a hard drive must be broken in order to extract data from the drive, we will re-seal the media upon completion of service which the manufacturer may accept for warranty purposes. You will also receive an invoice receipt to indicate you have pursued data recovery services with us.

How to Submit a Recovery Case

Email your collection details to calldesk@proactiveco.co.za and our courier will collect your notebook, laptop or preferably just the hard drive for recovery. Alternately bring your drive to our premises. See map for directions.

Careful packaging is important to preserve delicate electronics like hard drives. See Packaging Instructions to help avoid shipping damage.