Data Recovery is often a thankless business. We can spend hundreds of dollars on parts and many late days attempting to recover someone’s critical data files. And in the end, if we are unsuccessful, we don’t get paid and rarely do we get a thanks for our efforts, no matter how hero like our recovery efforts may have been. So when we receive a great big thank you and some pictures showing the fruits of our labour in use, we really like to soak it up. 
“Hi Bob,
you probably remember me from a few months ago. I had the hard drive from an X-ray machine in Haiti that had failed due to a power surge. I though you may be interested to know that thanks to the drive your company recovered the machine is now working again. I’ve attached some pictures for you from the mission in Haiti including pictures of the C-arm being used during a knee operation. The surgeon in the picture is Dr. Dell who covered the cost of the recovery. This surgery to implant a plate in a patient’s damaged knee would not have been possible without a working x-ray. I thought your team would appreciate seeing the results of a job well done.
Thanks and Blessings, Geoff “
The Real Doctor of Recovery, Dr. Dell doing his thing in Haiti
Back in August, Geoff, an associate of Dr. Dells asked if we could recover data from an old Quantum hard drive being used in an older X-ray machine in Haiti. It was a 52 MB hard drive, yes 52MB or .052GB or .0000052TB, small by today’s standards that’s for sure. As the disk drive was very old and few data recovery companies other then Toronto’s Memofix Data Recovery Services had the experience or parts to deal with it, we were asked to attempt the hard drive recovery in Toronto.
As it turns out the hard drive had been damaged by a power surge and it’s printed circuit board or PCB was fried. Additionally and more detrimental to our data recovery efforts, the surge damaged a small pre-amp chip that is located on the head assembly inside the sealed disk drive compartment. The chip is used to amplify the signals from the individual heads to the PCB and without its proper operation, no recovery would be possible.
On a current modern hard drive, we would simply replace the entire head assembly but this older Quantum hard drive used a unique hybrid positioning system for controlling the heads and it could not be simply replaced with a new one if the data was to be recovered. This hybrid positioning system used a combination of an optical encoder for rough head positioning and an embedded servo system for fine positioning. As a result the relationship between the two positioning methods was critical and could not be altered or replaced with anything but the original mechanical parts.
With Memofix’s grey haired experience in repairing legacy hard disk drives we were able to replace the pre-amp chip on the original head assembly and restore the hard drive to an operating state. We then created an exact image of the entire original hard drive onto a new Quantum 52AT hard drive. Interestingly enough, we had a new Quantum hard drive sitting in our stock, still sealed in a bag we received directly from the now defunct manufacture in the early 90′s.
Sometimes it’s good to be a pack rat that’s been around forever! Especially when our efforts in Toronto help a good doctor spread heath and healing through a country that really needs everyone’s help. May the forces of good be with the people of Haiti!
