As I noted previously, I took my hard drives to a place to try to have the data recovered. I was not impressed by Eboxlab DHE Computers Company (see comments), the guys who I took the drives to.

They called me yesterday and told me that they tried to mount the RAID slices on a linux box and couldn’t so they couldn’t get the data. Several things strike me as wrong here:

1. I don’t think most Linux OSes will recognize a Mac OS X created software RAID array, or a disk formatted with HFS+ (perhaps someone can clarify this in the comments?).
2. The original problem was that I couldn’t mount the RAID slices – that is why I took the drives to them in the first place.

They may do good work for Windows and Linux drives, but I don’t recommend them for Mac OS X drives.

I was going to take the drives to Reynolds Data Recovery (UPDATE: I do not recommend them based on this experience), a company that had attended BarCampDenver, but Eboxlab assured me they could do the job and get it done in 24-48 hours, and for a lower rate, so I gave them a shot.

As a result, I lost about 4 hours driving back and forth and delayed my potential data recovery by 3-4 days. I should have known better – beware the low estimate.

Hopefully Reynolds will have some success and sometime next week I’ll have some of my data back.

I couldn’t afford to have my desktop offline for another week so I stopped by the local Best Buy and picked up a couple of replacement hard drives: 300GB Seagates¹. I’ve set them up in a RAID 1 pair and I restored from my most recent backup². If I get my data back I’ll do some selective updates from that data, but I’m back to work on a proper machine in the interim.

I really missed my desktop the last few days – I’ve become so accustomed to the screen real estate. I now find it hard to really work on the laptop.

And yes, I’m using the Logitech S 530 but I haven’t installed the software. I’m using the recommended USB Overdrive for the mouse, which works well. I’m not using any drivers for the keyboard at the moment, which means all the “special” keys don’t do anything. The only thing I really miss is the volume control on the keyboard.

The keyboard action is totally different than my previous keyboard and I’m making a lot of typos as a result. It’s not the same action as a laptop keyboard either – a little stiffer. I haven’t decided yet if it’s bad different or just different . I’m making a few more typos than normal, but it’s getting better.

UPDATE (2006-12-05): the folks at Reynolds Data Recovery say they can get 96-98% of my data back.

UPDATE (2006-12-20): things aren’t going well with Reynolds Data Recovery.

1. For $150 each retail, not bad at all. [back]
2. From 2006-08-23 – not too bad, not great either. [back]

This post is part of the thread: Hard Drive Recovery – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.