tures than you’ll need—
including a help-desk
function that issues and
manages trouble tickets—
but it won’t cost you
anything to check it out.
Another option is Intel’s
IT Director (www.intel.
com). It will monitor your
machines’ security states
and the status of their AV
and firewall. It’s free, but
will only work with Intel-
based machines equipped
with vPro.
Platter
Transplants?
I recently had a hard
drive failure and lost the
data from my external
drive (a WD Passport).
I don’t have the time or
money to send it off to a
data recovery service. If I
get a drive with the same
characteristics as the one
that failed, and proceed
to transfer the platters to
the new hard drive in the
cleanest possible environ-
ment, can I recover my
data? Do I have to keep
the platters lined up in
the same position they
were in in the old drive?
Is there any way I could
screw up the platters’
sync? I tried a new con-
troller board for the hard
drive with no result.
To avoid storing data
on disks with moving parts,
I’m thinking of grabbing
a large thumb drive, like
a Corsair Voyager. What’sthe lifespan of such a
thumb drive compared to
a spinning-platter HDD?
SSDs are out of the picture
right now, as I need to
use the drive over mul-
tiple operating systems.
Windows XP, which is used
at my university, has no
Trim support. Any advice
would be appreciated.
—Cosmin AdamCosmin, unless you have
access to an industrial
clean room, we have to rec-
ommend against opening
up your hard drive. Even
the tiniest bit of dust can
seriously damage your
platters. We don’t know of
any nonprofessional who’s
ever opened up a harddrive and got it working
again. If replacing the con-
troller board with one from
a drive of the exact same
make and model didn’t
work, and you’ve already
tried just plugging the drive
into a spare SATA port or a
different external adapter,
you might be out of luck,
without resorting to a data
recovery service. That’s
assuming the drive doesn’t
show up at all if you plug
the bare drive into a SATA
port on your computer. If it
does show up but without
any of the data, you could
be in luck—it’s possible
the file table has just been
corrupted. You can use
a program like TestDisk
(www.cgsecurity.org) to
try to restore the drive’s
file table and recover your
files. Whatever you do,
don’t format or overwrite
your drive until you’vetried TestDisk
As to the second part
of your question, flash
storage is especially useful
in portable drives, since
it’s more tolerant of drops
and jolts, and there are
no moving parts to get
ruined. Flash drive reli-
ability can vary; we have
a 256MB PNY Attaché
that’s been through the
wash five or six times over
the past seven years or so
and still works fine, but a
4GB drive from a differ-
ent manufacturer failed
within a few months. In
general, go with a repu-
table brand and make sure
you keep backups of
your data. Of course, if
you need to move large
amounts of data, mechani-
cal storage is your best
bet—unless you want to
drop $500 on a 256GB
flash drive.SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig?
First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic
display has fizzled, email the doctor at [email protected] for advice
on how to solve your technological woes.