Crashed harddrive - tips?

[deebix]

To any lawyers/tech out there, my nextdoor neighbor has his own IT business and today found himself in a sticky situation. To help him out I figure I'll ask here. He supposedly was installing software or configuring something for a client and as that was happening, their harddrive literally died right there. From the client's perspective, he said they took him as the cause leading to the effect. Some things of note: 1.) The client did not back anything up prior nor had any system in place (ouch). 2.) Said the harddrive was manufactured in 2004 making it 8+ years old. What defense can he play, if any, infront of a judge if he ends up getting sued or is he pretty much dead in the water for not making the client sign a liability form? Is he safe in the same way the manufacturer is safe from getting sued? I figure its like a car transmission going bad. cheers

[imtheomegaman]

he had a contract signed before he started work right?

[deebix]

No idea, I doubt it. Plan on no.

[knerona]

Has your friend tried everything he could to get the data of the hard drive yet? There are many ways to recover data depending on how bad the drive is.

[deebix]

Said the motherboard wont detect the drive at all, spun up and all that but no dice. Put it in his test box he carries around and no dice in that one either. Older IDE drive. I think its fubar minus some crazy mechanical data stripping.

[sholling]

Speaking as a techie this is why you need business liability insurance and contracts that protect you if you are going to work on peoples computers for money. You should also offer to do a backup first just to protect your butt. The fact that it's physically dead and not just corrupted says it's a drive problem.

[knerona]

Said the motherboard wont detect the drive at all, spun up and all that but no dice. Put it in his test box he carries around and no dice in that one either. Older IDE drive. I think its fubar minus some crazy mechanical data stripping.

Has he attempted using the drive as a slave? Just the other day, I had a crapped out drive that wouldn't boot. Replaced the drive, connected it as a slave and pulled out all the old data to the new drive.

[deebix]

Good question, will run it by him tomorrow on that. I dont think the client wants him near it again though lol.

[JaMail]

if it spins up and stutters, put it in plastic bag and then the freezer for an hour or so, then attach it as a slave and boot it up. you can usually get 30 minutes or so of run time before it heats up again.

[the86d]

Many times it is the board that dies, if it does not detect. You can find an "identical" drive, and swap boards on the drive itself...

Data might be able to be pulled if it detects, but is failing to read => freezer method. SpinRite (written in all assembly lingua) is $89 USD and works WELL for SMART data and marking bad sectors. There might be an open source version of something like Spinrite if it fails to read, but the hardware (board/connectors) is okay. You may not get ALL data, but you can gain much with something marking the sectors bad, and then recovering everything else that was not contained in those blocks/sectors.

I know Norton's old Disk Doctor can fix the MBR if the partition table was whacked out. One could possibly use an open source/freeware data/file carver to pull data from a drive that has no partition data, if I recall correctly even if it has issues (but the board is working). If using a data carver, you would need to know the extension of the files types you are trying to recover...

If he is trying to recover data MAKE SURE NOT TO WRITE TO THE DRIVE UNTIL YOU HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED OFF OF IT. Once it is written to it overwrites any data you could carve from it (on those blocks/sectors).

Hope something here helps.

If the drive died on the spot, the tech should not be held liable for customer's hardware failure, nor his data, in the event that it was the customer's hardware that may have failed, at the shop, or not. The drive could have dies during the backup process, or whatever. Customer's fault for not having a backup... You can't fix ignorant, nor stupid. (Any data that you care about should be stored in AT LEAST THREE PLACES [ONE UNPLUGGED UNLESS BEING USED]!!!)

[Coded-Dude]

might be cheaper to send it to drive savers than to fight a court battle.

[Nose Nuggets]

hard drives can fail at any time for a verity of reasons. i have had brand new drives fail 4 hours out of the box.

[Fizz]

It's Murphy's Law.

I make it perfectly clear to all my clients when I do work where I may be in control of critical data that is not backed up that they're to advise of the presence of such data so that I can make reasonable accommodations. They are also advise that I'm not responsible for it if anything happens.

Then they sign an agreement saying that I'm not responsible. Not that anyone ever reads it.

What I never understood is the mentality that things are my fault because things go awry; chances are the reason you're coming to me is because you can't do the work yourself. If something fails and then you tell me how I caused it, when they frequently admit ignorance from the onset.... it's maddening.

Just today a client said that she didn't want to do more than 1 hour's charge on a machine; this is normally sufficient for 95% of machines since we don't bill for time the computer is on the bench, just what we actively spend manipulating the machine. I called her at the end of it and said that I'm at the limit and that the machine is still non-operable. She had a virus infection that severely crippled the OS and even after the removal wasn't usable, even after repair install so advised that a fresh install was necessary. The client declined then complained that when she picked up 1 hour of work should have got the machine working. Sure, it would have if she'd followed my original suggestion of starting with a fresh install, but she wanted to attempt repair first since she didn't want to reinstall everything.

EDIT: Sorry for the hijack:

[mike452]

The drive is dead. Nothing much you can do if motherboard can't detect it and it does not spin up.

I tried buying an exact drive and replaced parts inside myself. It's was difficult to move the 6 read heads from the 3 platters and still didn't work. Don't do it!

Tell you friend to get evidence of drive failures and how companies recommends backup to be ready to face the judge. This is why my programmer contractors all have million dollar insurance.