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Recovering Data
from Drowned / Flooded Hard Drives

Knowing how to handle a soggy hard drive can make the difference to a successful data recovery.

click to see Disklabs website
August 2007 - by Simon Steggles, Director of Disklabs
the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
Sanitization Methods for Cleaning Up Hard Disk Drives
Editor's intro:- When your hard drives are flooded (including your disk to disk backup) it may still be possible to recover the data. This article discusses some important do's and don'ts which are critical to the success the data recovery process.
Flooding has always been a problem.

When it's expected, the problems can be mitigated. When it's unexpected, unsuspecting individuals and corporations can get caught out. This means that the average member of the public, small business etc is often unaware of what to do because of the rareness of this type of event. As is often the case, the public or small businesses often try to repair some types of jobs themselves. As the computer's most sensitive component is the hard disk drive, it is nearly always the first item to suffer the user's eagerness. Sadly for the person or company, the hard disk drive is of course the place where ALL their important data is kept. Simple solutions such as placing critical IT equipment on a first floor or second floor, somewhere known to be outside of the flood risk area can alleviate all the issues and mitigate the risk. It is the unexpected flood where catastrophe is more likely to occur.

Taking Hurricane Katrina (in 2005) as an example; the South East coast of the US expected and was ready for bad weather and all the associated hurricane related problems. What it wasn't ready for was the breaching of the Levees. This bought an exceptional amount of water into New Orleans, flooding the area, and of course causing billions of dollars of damage. This damage is generally thought of as literally bricks and mortar, however, there are also the hidden issues, such as the lost data on the residents/business owners computers, mobile phones, Blackberry's, PDA's etc.

More recently, in July 2007 in many parts of the UK , a month's worth of rainfall occurred in a single day. This happened several times in a month and caused rivers to burst their banks, causing devastating floods to areas not used to dealing with these types of incidents. Subsequently, thousands of people lost their data as their computers were left under water.
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Disklabs have successfully retrieved data from wet, flood damaged hard disk drives and based on that experience offer this checklist of fundamental Do's and Don'ts:-
damage on a hurricane Katrina disk
damage in a Hurricane Katrina flooded hard disk
1 - Do NOT attempt to recover the data yourself. This will do more damage to your data and makes it more difficult to recover when it eventually gets to a data recovery specialist.

When hard disk drives get wet, the 'heads' can get stuck to the platters. When the hard drive is powered up in this state the disk tries to spin up and the heads literally get ripped off causing damage to the platters - the place where all the data is stored.
2 - Do NOT DRY the hard disk drive out. Although this may seem paradoxical - this will nearly always destroy the platter of the hard disk thus making your data irretrievable.

When hard disk drives get wet then dry out, there is nearly always a residue of contaminant left on the platters and heads. Any residue (including a piece of dust), causes physical degradation of the hard disk's platters and loses more data.
3 - DO keep the hard disk WET. Ideally, keep the hard disk drive in a sealed container to keep the hard disk drive wet. This stops the hard disk drive corroding and allows the technical staff at the recovery company to clean and dry the platters correctly with minimum damage to the platter surfaces.

Normally, Disklabs Data Recovery charges a premium for water damaged hard disk drives, however, this additional charge for the cleaning and drying out of the hard disk drive has been waivered for the victims of the latest flooding events.
more data recovery related articles:-
Top 10 Storage Articles on STORAGEsearch.com?

The top 10 most popular articles on STORAGEsearch.com in July 2007 - were as follows...
  1. the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
  2. SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
  3. War of the Disks: Hard Disk Drives vs. Flash SSDs
  4. the Fastest SSDs
  5. Flash Memory vs. Hard Disks - Which Will Win?
  6. the 10 biggest storage companies in 2008
  7. NAS, DAS or SAN? - Choosing the Right Technology
  8. the Benefits of SAS for External Subsystems
  9. the Top 10 SSD OEMs
  10. Why Are Most Analysts Wrong About SSDs?
author Simon Steggles
About the author:- Simon Steggles is a director
of Disklabs Data Recovery and Computer
Forensics Services, and 1st Computer Traders.

Simon was a member of the British Royal Navy
where he worked in Communications and
Intelligence, leaving to take up a career in IT.
Simon specialised in storage, and now runs
Disklabs.

Simon enjoys his family, wine, good food, travel,
and computing.

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