Excellent Support
MacinTouch Reader
I had an experience today that made me want to write about a positive
moment in the t\1acintosh world. I hope. you will print it.
My external 5000B FireWire drive decided that it no longer wanted to
mount. This was a drive that had started as a backup, but over time
became an archive - a place where I dumped files to dear off space on
my PowerBook 04. I kept saying that I needed to get to CompUSA and buy
another drive, but I hadn't made the time. Murphy's law states the
obvious when it comes to computers...
So I pulled out the arsenal of disk utilities that I have – Tech Tool
Pro, Data Rescue, Drive Genius, Disk Warrior .
Tech Tool Pro says" sorry, nothing we can do".. .Data Rescue recovers
lots of things that seem to be files but either do not open or are
empty...Drive Genius says nothing is wrong with the drive...Disk
Warrior starts to run but returns an error.
I try running all of the applications again. Again, nothing.
So I email Drive Savers and ask for a recovery estimate. If I want it
tomorrow we're talking around 8k. One week from now between $1500
$2500. Can I get the drive two months from now for $300 ? No.
I run the applications again and get no better results. However, after
the Disk Warrior error numbers (2155, 2207) there is a message to
contact
AI soft Technical Support. I figure the price of a phone call is a
better place to start than a $1500 minimum.
I call and receive their answering machine which asks me to leave a
message that will be returned within two hours. Reluctantly, I oblige,
figuring a call to Drive Savers and a big check writing moment is
inevitable. However, to my surprise., a technician named Marc called me
back about forty five minutes later.
He asks some background about the drive and the circumstances under
which the drive failed and then asks me to open Disk Warrior and
Terminal. Then, for the next 30 minute-s he emails me commands to run
in Terminal and we output what he calls "raw data" from the drive. As
these files are sent off, he explains to me what we're doing...not in
technical terms but as if we were reading a book (i.e. "this file is
giving me a copy of what you could consider the table of
contents...each chapter number has a page number that leads us
someplace else...we need to make sure that the table of contents is
accurate).
After a few emails of my sending files to him, he sends a file back to
me which he says is a rewritten table of contents for the drive (a Disk
Header, maybe? I don't remember exactly). We run another command in
Terminal and then go back over to Disk Warrior. He has me hold down
keys on the keyboard and dick on the logo which brings up another menu
after he has me type in a password and we run another command (How
Cool! Hidden menus!). Then we rebuild in Disk Warrior.
We go flying past the part of the process where the error came up
previously. After about twenty minutes (during which we talked
computers and
operating systems and how he spends his days recovering drives like
thisoh, and we talked backup strategies) we reach the report. He has me
preview the directory and.....
...all of my files are there! Just as if nothing had happened! Elation
is an understatement.
Most people write only when something is wrong, and we take for granted
when something "goes right"... However...
What do you say to, and how do you thank, someone who has saved you
thousands of dollars and recovered, amongst other things, hundreds of
photos of your children, all because you paid $99 for a piece of
software?
I don't know what the answer is to the question I just asked, but I
thought saying thank you in a public place couldn't hurt. So, thank you
Alsoft for supporting your product (Disk Warrior), and thank you Marc
for the patience to walk a fairly knowledgeable but certainly not data
recovery savvy user through a fascinating and, of course., successful
data recovery experience.
