Data recovery - customer call out

A client called us out becasue she had lost valuable data and files such as photo, word processed file, video files and animination files.  The client had a Dell GX260 computer base which comprised of a floppy drive, 120 gigabyte, DVD Rewriter.  The hard drive had Windows 7 on it, 6 USB ports and the usual odds and ends normally associated with a computer base.  We attempted to recover all our client's files with Data Recovery Software called Recover My Files.  To use this software, we had to plug into an available USB port on the computer base, our USB pen drive that had this software on it.  We then proceeded to find the clien'ts files as the following video will show.

With many different data recovery programs available on the market, we found Recovery My Files extremely easy and straight forward to use and the user interface is not as cumbersome as many people would have you think.  Recovery My Files gave us several options to find files (i.e. Quick file search, Complete file search, Unformat hard drive Search and other searches).  We clicked on complete file search becasue we wanted to find all the files that the client told  us to find.  With Recover My Files, you're given an option that allows you to state what sort of file type your looking for (e.g. Jpeg files, Bitmap files, Word files, Excel files, etc).  You can search for over 300 + files types with Recover My Files.  We managed to file 95% of all our client files using Recover My Files. We found and recovered 28 videos on the customer's hard drive and when we clicked on each on, each of these videos worked.   Once the files we're found we then had to save these files to other storage media so we managed to save all the recovered files found to DVD. (i.e. Recover my files then burnt these recovered files to DVD storage media).   The data recovery job took us 6 hours to complete (Data recovery takes a long time when you do it properly using the complete file search).  We had to look for our customer's photos separately since choosing to look for the photo's along with other files at the same time may have led to a lot of these files not being found.  After recovering our client's files, our client seemed pleased with the results but was wondering why the data recovery process took so long.  We explained to the customer that becasue his machine had a very old processor in, the prcessor intensive task of locating and recovring files only took so long becasue of the speed and amount of memory inside the computer.  The comptuer had 1GB of ram and was struggling to cope due to lack of system resources.  The cusomter asked us if there was any way around this problem so we suggested he buy a complete new motherboard with 2 GB of memory and then call us back when he wanted the new board fitted into the case.  Within a few weeks of us completing the data recovery of the client's hard drive, the client then called us back to install a new motherboard with CPU (Dual Core motherboard with CPU).

RECOVERING DATA FROM A HARD DRIVE THAT CRASHED

A client called us out becasue the hard drive on her computer had crashed and everytime she tried to turn her computer on, after 10 seconds the computer would switch off stating because of an electrical fault (e.g. power surge) the computer would shut down so as to save files from damage on the comptuer's hard drive.  The client tried in vain to start her computer herself but had no luck so she called us.  We opened up her Packard Bell PC and saw that she had a Sata hard drive (160 GB in capacity) so lucily, on hand we had another hard drive in our  PC repair toolkit box that had Windows XP on (our hard drive was also sata 320GB) so we took out the client's hard drive from her machine and inserted our hard drive into her computer.  On switching on our client's computer, the Packard Bell machine booted into Windows XP.  We then attached a Sata docking station (i.e. a device which allows you to attach internal sata hard drives to it's unit in order for a working computer to read the information/data contained on the crashed hard drive)via USB  as illustrated below.

                                           Sata Hard Drive Docking Station

The hard drive docking station has many uses and is extremely to use, just insert the base end of the hard drive (i.e. where sata connector is) and gently push down until it snaps into place. One of the major advantages that this type of hard drive docking station has is it's ability to transfer data/files/information from one hard drive to another or other type of storage media.  It's also possible to back up the whole hard drive using back up software such as Norton's Ghost which is illustrated in the following video.