Cheap Hard Drive Recovery - Success

A friend recently asked if I knew how to recover his pictures from his crashed (Macintosh) hard drive. The "genius" store geeks had tried to read it by booting from another drive and just looking at this one. That didn't work. My friend wasn't ready to pony up for a level-2 recovery attempt - $750 whether or not the procedure was successful!!

Now, I have been pretty tuned into hard drives for years because of my profession. I have seen hard drives crash. I have used both manufacturer's and open source tools to read and interpret SMART data on drives. I have opened and examined hard drives that have suffered from shock, vibration, thermal torture and customer abuse. I have watched hard drives spin topless. I have painted them with Omegalaq and used thermocouples as thin as a hair to check internal temperatures. In addition I have read articles about the various degrees of data recovery possible (from freeware on up to thousand$). I thought I could offer some assistance.

Knowing that the drive didn't even work inside his laptop with an external boot I figured I would try to find a similar drive on ebay and swap in the disks. Yes there's a risk of contamination but I just wanted 1 pass to grab those files - just a few minutes of operation was all I asked. There was one in Australia with a datecode a few days away. But before I spend the $70 (plus who-knows-how-much shipping) I did just a little extra homework.

I found a guy talking about getting those few extra minutes by putting the drive in the freezer overnight and then using it. My young, geek cube-neighbor at work said he had heard about this but always worried about the condensation killing it too fast. He also said that Apple formats its drives in such a way that I would probably need a Linux OS to properly see it.

Since this was a SATA drive I was in luck. I have access to a little USB connected pod that can accommodate a SATA drive. So I put the whole thing in the freezer for a couple days and just ran the cables out to the host laptop (i.e. my work laptop with an Ubuntu install on it). After getting some advice about how to navigate around the command line (not my specialty - yet necessary due to the permissions issues on the Mac drive) we were able to run the drive for hours and recover all the pictures!

St. Francis of Assisi was really John!

So who doesn't love and admire St. Francis of Assisi? (Rhetorical question! Everyone who knows him loves him). I learned in a sermon this morning that St. Francis of Assisi actually shares my name. So I get to add to my extensive list of patron saints:


John the Baptist, preacher, ascetic, and reported baptizer of Jesus Christ
John the Evangelist, speculated author of the Fourth Gospel, traditionally identified with the John the Apostle
John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation, traditionally identified with John the Apostle and Evangelist
St. Francis of Assisi (baptized: Giovanni di Pietro Bernardone)
John the Wonderworking Unmercenary (d. ca. 304), Egyptian or Mesopotamian healer
John Chrysostom (347-407), Antiochene Archbishop of Constantinople
John Cassian (ca. 360-435), probably Scythia-Minor priest and abbot
John of Egypt (d. 394), Egyptian hermit
Pope John I (d. 526), Italian pope
John Climacus (ca. 525-606), Syrian or Byzantine monk and abbot
John the Merciful (d. ca. 620), Cyprian Patriarch of Alexandria
John of Damascus (ca. 676-749), Syrian monk and priest, also known as John Damascene
John of Beverley (d. 721), Angle bishop
John of Pavia (d. 813), Bishop of Pavia
John of Rila (876-ca. 946), Bulgarian priest and hermit
John of Matha (1154-1213), French priest; founder of the Trinitarian Order
John of Meda (d. 1159), Italian priest
John of Nepomuk (ca. 1345-1393), Bohemian vicar general of Jan of Jenštejn
Giovanni da Capistrano (1386-1456), Italian friar; summoner of European troops for the 1456 siege of Belgrade
John Fisher (ca. 1469-1535), English cardinal and martyr
John Houghton (martyr) (ca. 1486-1535), English abbot and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Stone (martyr) (d. 1538/1539), English friar and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John of God (1495-1550), Portuguese friar; founder of the Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God
John of Avila (1500-1569), Spanish Jewish converso priest, missionary and mystic
John Payne (martyr) (1532-1582), English priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Leonardi (1541-1609), Italian priest; founder of the Clerks Regular of the Mother of God of Lucca
John of the Cross (1542-1591), Spanish Jewish converso friar, priest and mystic; joint founder of the Discalced Carmelites
John Boste (ca. 1544-1594), English priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Rigby (martyr) (ca. 1570-1600), English martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Roberts (martyr) (1575/1576-1610), Welsh priest, Prior of St. Gregory's (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Sarkander (1576-1620), Polish priest and martyr
John Ogilvie (saint) (1579-1615), Scottish priest and martyr
John Jones (martyr) (d. 1598), Welsh priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Southworth (martyr) (1592-1654), English priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649), French missionary and martyr (one of the North American Martyrs)
John Kemble (martyr) (1599-1679), English priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Wall (priest) (1620-1679), English priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Plessington (ca. 1637-1679), English priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (1651-1719), French priest; founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools
John Joseph of the Cross (1654-1739), Ischian friar, priest and Vicar Provincial of the Alcantarine Reform in Italy
John Lloyd (d. 1679), Welsh priest and martyr (one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales)
John Dat (ca. 1765-1798), Vietnamese priest and martyr
Jean Vianney (1786-1859), French priest
John Hoan Trinh Doan (ca. 1789/1798-1861), Vietnamese priest and martyr
John Thanh Van Dinh (1796-1840), Vietnamese martyr
John Baptist Con (1805-1840), Vietnamese martyr
John Neumann (1811-1860), Bohemian missionary, Bishop of Philadelphia, founder of the first American Catholic diocesan school system
John Baptist Y (ca. 1800-1839), one of the Korean Martyrs
John Bosco (1815-1888), Italian priest and educator; founder of the Salesians of Don Bosco and the Salesian Cooperators
John of Kronstadt (1829-1908), Russian archpriest and synod member

                                                 ... orate pro nobis!