Data Recovery company Birmingham Alabama

The only Data Recovery company Birmingham Alabama that we like is Vulcan Data in Hoover.  If you are attempting to recover data from a hard drive that still spins, and does not make any clicking noises, the chances are, 92% of the time, they can recover your files, documents and precious photos for less than $200.  If you are looking for head replacements, controller cards, or other physcial repairs, get out your check book – it will cost you.

Hard Drive replacements are here – Welcome the new SSDs

Faster than expected, the new hard-drives, known as SSDs are here. SSD – or Solid State Drives, are the replacement for the long failing, spinning mechanical versions that have driven the data recovery business for the past 30 years. Affordable now as a replacement, these drive can now be had for a paltry $115 for a 40GB variety

My thumb drive is not recognized

A common situation, you insert your thumb drive into your computer and nothing happens.  You remove it, insert it into another machine, still nothing.  There are 3 possibilities:

1. You have broken the connector on your thumb drive
2. You have lost or corrupted  the boot record on the thumb drive
3. Your board or chipset is dead, and a circuit(s) is broken

The first 2 items can be corrected.  The 3rd is almost impossible, and most repair companies refuse to accept dead boards because consumers refuse to pay for the repair and expenses involved.  If you have a thumb drive with the 1st 2 symptoms, you can have your data recovered for under $90 most of the time.

Intel shipping new flash drives

The all new drives are labeled X25-M.   In fact, Intel decided to not change the model name of these new 34nm drives, which is apt to confuse some of you who go out hunting for the new and improved version.As of today, the channel price quoted for the X-25M 80GB is $225 (down from $595 at introduction one year ago) and the 160GB version is $440 (down from $945) for quantities up to 1,000 units.

Microsoft releases Windows 7 on the public

Microsoft releases Windows 7 on the public

Bill Gates unveiled the new Windows operating system know as Windows 7 on an unsuspecting public at the TED conference.  No software was actually released, just the bugs were let out.  Microsoft is rumored to be developing a viral strain that can be inhaled to wipe out competitors

Flash Drives pushing over 1 GB/s transfer rate

A new configuration from Micron can push data at over 1GB/sec over a PCIe card with 2 SSD flash drives

How to repair a damaged usb flash drive

Flash drives today are ubiquitous, mainly because they have become very affordable, and much more portable than external disk drives.  Unfortunately, the risks associated with flash media can be more than traditional disk drives.  Most folks do not understand tthe procedure to unmount drives before removing them from the port.  This procedure is very important to prevent corruption of the partition and file tables.  Most flash drives employ the use of FAT16 or FAT32 file systems to allow for universal access from all operating systems (Mac, PC, and Linux).  Unfortunately, these file systems are easily corrupted during write operations as the drives are removed.  Most of the time the files are still there, but the file tables and formatting are corrupt, making the drive unreadable, and unusable.  Many times the user mistakenly FORMATS the drive when prompted by the OS- which can be devastaing for your data.

Many times, formatting your drive will make it functional, but most times you will permenantly destroy your data.  So it is always good to know a few techniques to avoid data loss.

Rules:

1. Never write to your flash drive if you cannot see your data – this means, do not format, and do not use anti-corruption tools or “disk repair” tools like SpinRite, or any other S.M.A.R.T based (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) tools that write to your drive
2. If you don’t understand sectors, cylinders, file structure, and do not have a thorough understanding of file systems, do NOT ATTEMPT to use this guide
3. You should always have two copies of your files, and you should NEVER use flash media as primary storage, rather, only to move files from one place to another.  Now ask yourself, why are you reading this if you have another copy of your missing files?

If you are an IT professional, and have experience with CLI, click here for instructions and tools

If you are a Do-it-yourself guy – click here for instructions