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Head swaps are needed for a variety of reasons. Generally this type of invasive procedure is needed when the hard drive clicks or a drive motor is stuck or burnt.

IT IS NOT EASY AND AN INEXPERIENCED TECHNICIAN CAN COMPLETELY DESTROY YOUR DATA IF THEY ARE NOT VERY CAREFUL.

Head swaps are difficult for a variety of reasons:

• The work must be performed in a cleanroom environment.
• Knowing how to find a matching head is an art.
• Developing custom head removal tools.
• Some heads have amplifiers that must match the board’s electronics.
• The heads are microscopic and delicate.
• The alignment must be precise.

Head swaps are considered the hardest aspect of data recovery due to the sensitive nature and experience needed to properly perform them. Take your time in researching who does the recovery for you as experience counts in this arena!

Been working hard on our blog lately and wanted to add in some article sharing tools. We decided to use AddThis. They make it very easy to add 286 services (at current count)!

We kept it to the most common sharing services: Twitter, Facebook, Email, Print and a new one Facebook Like. It really is as simple as adding a few lines of code to your WordPress pages.

We inserted the following code in to our Single Post page:

(NOTE: replace username=xxxxx with your actual AddThis username.)

You get this:

That is it! Adding Facebook Like is dead simple using WordPress and AddThis.

Happy to announce that our secure deletion product MediaWIPE 2.0.3.0 has passed the Windows 7 Logo program. With that we can now display a fancy Win 7 logo on our boxes, website and marketing material.

What is “Compatible With Windows 7″? Simply, passing Microsoft-designed tests to make sure the product works correctly on Windows 7. It ensures compatibility and reliability when installed.

Why do it? It helps your product stand out from the crowd. A customer knows your product has gone through extra testing to ensure it works well. Many OEM customers will only bundle if you have passed the Windows 7 Logo program.

Is it hard to get? Kind of. The testing part is easy. Microsoft makes it simple with the Windows 7 Client Software Logo Toolkit. The code signing (we used a Verisign Digital Certificate) was the hardest part. Once you get that out of the way it is as simple as signing some agreements and you are approved!

Erasing your hard drive with zero fill utilities is the easiest way to ensure no one gets their hands on your files when you go to sell online or donate. “Zeroing out” prevents most data recovery software programs and methods from discovering your files.

It isn’t as secure as a secure three-pass wipe, DoD seven step erasing, Gutman or physical degaussing. These methods are more time consuming and only needed for the most sensitive data.

Most hard drive manufacturers include a free utility for users. This utility can be burned to a CD which is then used to boot in to to start the data wiping. Here is a list of utilities by drive manufacturer:

Hitachi
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

Maxtor and Seagate
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?lang=en

Continued…

It used to be that when a board failed you could just buy another drive with the same firmware and swap the board and your drive would *possibly* work. Whole side businesses have sprung up marketing boards on eBay and Craigslist. The chances of this working on current drives is about zero.

Modern drives are calibrated to extremely fine tolerances. The manufacturers do this to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the hardware.

One way they do this is by calibrating each head, drive and platter at the factory.

You see not all heads read and write with the same sensitivity. Platters do not have the same magnetic coercivity evenly across the platter.  Because of this the manufactures build the drives and then they run a bunch of tests to determine how much voltage each head needs for each part of the platter to write and read.

All this information is stored in tables and saved in the drive’s firmware.
These values are called ‘adaptives’ and are unique to each drive – so swapping a board wont work.

In order to swap a board you have to reprogram it, fix it or swap the chips. This requires special expensive equipment and knowledge to properly recover the data.

The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo. The lessons here can easily be applied to “off-line” software.

At some point you’ll meet an employee, consultant, customer or even a founder that I like to call the “Idea Guy.” Overzealous by nature, he pitches you on the greatest idea-of-the-day. New ideas are viral by nature and can get people excited and motivated to work. He feeds on this excitement.

“Check out what competitor Y is doing…we could add this to our offering?” “It would be great if we could also do this, this and this.” “I’m all about synergies.” “I know such and such, let’s do a deal with them” And on and on.

Ideas are great, but they can’t replace good, hard work on even one simple idea. An idea is 1% of the equation. Hard work is the other 99%.

If you follow the Idea Guy’s lead you’ll be stretched in a million directions. You are far better off to rein in the Idea Guy and focus on core value ideas. Use his motivation and focus it on COMPLETING projects before starting on new ones.