Trying to run FABS against a drive that apparently won't initialize

[brandonkick]

IMHO every tech should have a Linux machine on their workbench. From mounting and reading drives that Windows won't/can't to using ddrescue for recovery it's a resource all of us should have and use (especially considering the price - heh).

Agreed. I just don't do this pretty much at all any more.

My software engineering career has me way too busy (plus two young little daughters) to consider doing break / fix and I'm not going to bother offering data recovery support like this in mission critical situations anyways. Not worth it to me.

A few years back, when I joined here, I was doing around 5-7 break fix jobs a month on the side when I was a brand new software dev. Now I'm doing a handful a year, and really honestly don't want those jobs... they are the ones that come back to me and I don't have the heart to say no. Family members / friends I sold machines too in the past few years or the lone customer or two who doesn't trust anyone else.

 

[frase]

IMHO every tech should have a Linux machine on their workbench. From mounting and reading drives that Windows won't/can't to using ddrescue for recovery it's a resource all of us should have and use (especially considering the price - heh).

No-one listens unfortunately it seems. I have a dedicated linux system for this purpose, with m.2 card readers of various formats as well.

 

[trevm999]

Agreed. I just don't do this pretty much at all any more.

My software engineering career has me way too busy (plus two young little daughters) to consider doing break / fix and I'm not going to bother offering data recovery support like this in mission critical situations anyways. Not worth it to me.

A few years back, when I joined here, I was doing around 5-7 break fix jobs a month on the side when I was a brand new software dev. Now I'm doing a handful a year, and really honestly don't want those jobs... they are the ones that come back to me and I don't have the heart to say no. Family members / friends I sold machines too in the past few years or the lone customer or two who doesn't trust anyone else.

I tell people people I don't have the tools anymore.

 

[HCHTech]

IMHO every tech should have a Linux machine on their workbench.

Yes indeed. We have two so that it doesn't slow down new tickets if we have to do a long ddrescue run. And, any questionable drive goes to a Linux machine to test the drive first before even powering on the patient computer. You can tell by the client's description of the problem if it sounds like the drive. There is too much risk of damaging your chances of recovery by attempting to mount a failing drive in Windows - regardless of what that recovery entails. It usually takes under 5 minutes to know what your options are. In our shop we run PC-Doctor on the drive-less computer too, just to give us a read of the condition of everything else.

Once both of those things are done, we have enough information to call the client and give them the choices, cost estimates, and set their expectations appropriately. They choose, then we can proceed.

Before we adopted this strategy, we often found ourselves in the position of spending too much time on units that the client didn't elect to repair, so we were stuck with just our diagnostic fee for revenue.

With this SOP, though, we never (well, 99% of the time) lose money on the "last rites" cases, and our in-shop data recoveries are a lot more profitable, too.

 

[NJW]

Regarding the Linux test machine, I'd go further and strongly recommend not using a mainstream Linux desktop distro for testing purposes. They (generally) have the same problem that Windows does – drives are automatically mounted at boot, which is not what you want.

My preference is for SystemRescueCD, which doesn't process any attached drives, by default. You can still run smartctl and ddrescue, without the risk of the OS doing further damage by trying to mount a drive that has problems.