Disk Doctors? Western Digital? I won't recommend either!

Posted on Friday, March 16th

Sometimes I try to help clients and step outside the boundaries of web development and into repair. I always regret doing it, but for some reason I can't stop myself from wanting to help out someone I have a relationship with in the computer realm.

I'm pretty knowledgeable when it comes to Windows issues, having experienced and resolved most every possible problem myself. I enjoy sharing this knowledge (and of course making a few extra dollars doing it). In the long run though, it is a waste of my time since my real strength is web design and development. I find that after each repair job I take on that I swear "I'll never touch another person's computer again!", but eventually find myself working on someone's virus-ridden, XP Home edition nightmare.

Finally the last straw showed itself. Let me share this experience. I had a client who purchased a new laptop mere months ago and somehow completely filled a 60gb hard drive. Couldn't save, couldn't defrag, couldn't do anything! Enter me, the fool with a kind heart to the rescue.

I figured that purchasing a new external hard drive and moving the superfluous file over along with an install of Cobian Backup would solve that problem real quick and we could all get on with our lives. Boy was I ever wrong.

The first mistake I made was getting involved of course, but the next thing that went wrong was the hard drive itself. Within a week the external drive was dead. Dead as a doornail. The drive? It was a Western Digital iBook 250gb external USB drive. The packaging of the iBook gave off an iMac feeling, a good safe feeling, so among the various drives available at Staples that day, I picked it up for the big rescue.

What was wrong with the drive? Well, it definitely wasn't spinning up. That's pretty bad news in plain English.

I immediately called Western Digital to see what my options were. They explained that all they could do would be to replace the bad drive with a new one, empty of my client's precious data. Crap, I'm wondering, am I going to be sued over this?

I tell the client that I'll take the drive with me and try removing it from the plastic casing and manually try to get the data off using some of my handy-dandy IDE interfaces I have lying around from previous repair jobs I should have never touched. Not that I don't know what I'm doing, I could give most freshly schooled techs a spanking in the real world, but again, this isn't my business, just a distraction from it.

So I take the drive home, peel the plastic casing open, remove the drive, plug it in and.... no spin up, and, holy shit, the drive is so hot is nearly burns my hand within mere seconds of it receiving power. Great. Thanks for a great product, WD.

I search on google for a data recovery service. Up pops disk doctors. Their website creates the impression of a reputable company who even has a lab in my state. How nice. I call and talk with a nice foreign gentleman. We agree that the control card for the drive is most likely the culprit. I send up the drive the a free "looksie".

A week goes by. No response from Disk Doctors. I call them to find out what's going on. Some girl answers the number with a "hello". Not a "Hello, Disk Doctors", nor a "Disk Doctors", just a "hello". Did I call someone's teenage daughter's bedroom phone or something? No, it turns out that it is in fact Disk Doctors, minus any level of professionalism whatsoever.

To make matter worse, she says they don't have the drive! Needless to say, I completely freak out on her, get put on hold and they magically have the drive again. Tech hasn't looked at it yet. He's in another state.

Another week goes by. Nothing yet after another fine conversation with the teenage daughter. Another week goes by. Nothing. Now were into the month status with no answer as to what is going on.

In all fairness, hard drives are difficult to work with so I'm, trying to be as cool as possible about the delays. You can't just stick any control card onto any hard drive and have it work. I figure the fact that the drive was manufactured in October 2006 would lend to the parts being found more easily vs. some old "bigfoot" drive (only real nerds remember bigfoots) that is from eons ago. Not so. They finally give up and return the drive.

I go to Staples the next day to find that all the iBooks are on the "flea market" crap table at half price along with other technological rejects like Microsoft Money 98 etc... It felt like an additional slap in the face.

I return to Western Digital with my head hung low. They now offered information related to "data recovery partners" right on the front of the website. I can only suppose that the high quality of the iBook prompted the highlighted appearance of this information.

I sent the drive to their partner CBL Data Recovery and am awaiting what will hopefully be good news so I can return the data and REALLY, and I mean REALLY never take on a repair job again so I can focus on worrying about what matters in my world, design and development.

The moral? Mind your own business, especially when it has to do with your own business.

As a follow up, I had great success with CBL. They recovered every bit of data and I had everything returned to me on a series of DVDs. I was happy, the client was happy, and everyone lived happily ever after....well until the next tragedy!

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