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:
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.
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.
How does your customer find you? What marketing or promotion activities are your competitors finding success with? Which medium do they find you through; retail, web search, a package insert, TV advertising, magazine article, newspaper article?
These are all important questions to answer to have hopes of growing your company. If you don’t answer them you will wind up wasting time and money chasing the wrong channels.
For an established market many of these questions have been answered. Let’s say you sell backup software. Selling backup software is like selling insurance. The market has been molded through PR, magazine articles, newspapers, etc. Backup software customers are essentially everyone with a computer. The software backup shopper can be found at retail, web search and word-of-mouth.
Entering a new market is tougher. You will have a few starts-and-stops and although it will be more expensive and take more time to find the customer than an established market, the payoff is generally greater as you will be a bigger fish in a (hopefully) big pond.
Finding your customer and how to sell to them is key to growth. Once you find success here you can continue to leverage that with further time and investment.
Software sales reps are good at selling given the right product, tools, direction, experience, leverage, autonomy, expense account, etc…. Ok, a lot of things need to go right to have success in sales.
You need to know how your customer buys.
As an employer many times you can’t just hire a sales rep and send them off without perspective. They may think they can sell your product the same way they sold the last, but this generally ends in failure and possibly a hurt relationship.
The rep has strength and confidence in previous success, connections, and managing the process. But they’ve never sold a product just like yours in your market. That is why you need to test the waters initially. The best way to do this is with commission or base pay + commission for someone you feel very confident in.
You won’t find success by hiring a rep and sending them out in the wild Day 1. A 6 month trial run is enough time to train the rep on your product and market. You’ll know quickly by checking your bank account if the rep is doing a good job!
Recently I received a RAID for data-recovery. Should be easy, the tech said… its just a ‘lost configuration’ situation. He said the RAID had an error so he rebuilt and swapped the bad drive – but when he rebooted – the RAID was gone…. uh-oh. So should easy, right… just a lost-RAID-configuration.
Whats this configuration you ask? A RAID is composed of multiple drives, that are setup up in 1 of many optional configurations. If that config information is lost then you can’t access the array. In reality a lost-RAID-configuration can be very complicated to fix. There can be many permutations of possible answers:
Are there hot spares?
Is it RAID-0? RAID-1? RAID-5? RAID-50?
Which drives are current and which may be stale?
Are the data clues from the current OS or ghosts from a previous life?
Did they rebuild the array? Reset parity? or rebuild a spare?
This was 5 x 320 gb hard drives, possibly from a Buffalo NAS box, ( it doesn’t matter to me because I always analyze the bare drives and then figure out the truth…) Lucky for them they stopped playing when it didn’t work – many techs will just keep swapping drives and start rebuilding and cause more damage.
I wrote my RAID recovery utilities years ago. The scans told me that there should be a 960 gb volume. Three drives were in their own metal cage. So it could be a 3×320= 960gb RAID-0 stripe set. However, when I tried to assemble it that way I found that it wouldn’t line up. Hmmm…could it be that its really a 4 x 320gb RAID-5 ? You see a 4-drive RAID-5 and 3-drive RAID-0 are the same size. Yep – thats what it turned out to be – a 4 x 320 RAID-5.
But the RAID wasn’t done with me yet….
One drive had a broken board that needed fixing.
Then there were bad sectors on another drive.
…and it was out-of-sync – which meant that only 3 drives out of the 5 drive set would give the best result.
The take-aways from this are:
Easy lost configuration problems can be anything but..
If you or your techs have a problem STOP – you are in real serious danger of making it unrecoverable.
Utilities are helpful – but tools but have their limits.
Experience and a complete understanding of RAID levels and layouts are required (can you look at hex dump and tell parity from data?).
Understanding low-level on-disk file-system structures are required (can you interpret a MFT or XFS superblock – in hex?).
The customer got his data back 100% – but only because his tech stopped while he was ahead, and sent it to a professional.
May 19th 
Posted by Korey
