I was asked to attempt to recover some data from a failed HDD.

The 40GB drive didn’t make any strange noises, and while connected to another PC, I could see files and folders.

Just to be safe, I froze the drive, then ran selfimage (in order to minimise the time the drive was left running).

I ended up making 3 images, but each time, I would only get 35 GB before selfimage would fail.

Once I had the images, I used getdataback to read the image, and extract all the files and folders to an area of my hard drive.

Since it was very likely that the last few gigabytes on the drive were mostly “empty” I figured I must have all the data I need.

The only problem was that many of the folder names had been lost… so most folders had names like: [001234], but the filenames and contents seemed perfect.

Since the customer was specifically looking for his accounting software, and his emails, I place them onto a seperate CD, with instructions on how to import the emails (which I tested previously).

The customer is very happy, as the data recovery only cost him a small part of the $2000 plus he was quoted by a PC “shop”.