1.21 Jigawatts of Computing Power Front Page

One of my clients called me the other day with a problem of his computer not booting. After some quick diagnosis over the phone, I came to the conclusion the power supply must have went out. Not a big deal, this is a fairly easy item to replace in a desktop computer. Little did I know there was a little more to this story than I knew.

I received the computer and tested the power supply. Sure enough, the power supply was bad. However, I also noticed there was some additional damage to the computer. The motherboard had several burn marks and bloated capacitors. I immediately removed each component like the hard drive, video card, optical drive, etc. only to find that each of these components were fried as well. I have never in my life seen a power supply take out so many components within a computer. Something wasn’t quite right.

After explaining the situation to my client, I found that he left out a major part of the story. We’ve been experiencing some extreme weather this year in Montana with a lot of lightning storms. Apparently, during one of these recent storms, my client’s house was struck by lightning and took out several components in the process. I was really surprised to learn that the computer was left on when this event happened. He said there was a huge boom and his power went out. The storm quickly passed and when the power did come back; his cable, internet, and computer were all toast. Unfortunately, the computer didn’t travel through time or hit light speed… sorry Doc.

The computer could easily be rebuilt from scratch. It was on the older side and long overdue for an upgrade. The real problem was the old hard drive was inoperable and there wasn’t any backups to use. Even with the internal DVD Burner, ‘ol skool Zip Drive, and even access to the Internet, he never thought he should backup his data. The computer was approaching the 5 year old mark and never once did he ever consider backing anything up. I was totally shocked by this and not surprised at the same time.

What’s next? Well, I did everything I could think of to get the data off of the drive. The hard drive itself seemed to be fine, just wouldn’t accept any power. I thought I could get the same hard drive components from a sister drive and swap them out, but finding old gear like this is next-to impossible and I had no luck. Plus, I had no guarantee it would even work if I could find anything. I ended up opting to send the drive to a company in Texas, ACS Data Recovery. They have a clean room environment for data recovery like this and have access to more drive components than myself. ACS was quick to respond and was able to recovery the data which they mirrored to an external hard drive. The entire process ended up costing up into the $1000 range with shipping and new components. Definitely an expensive lesson to learn.

When was the last time you’ve made a backup? Obviously, it’s pretty rare to have your house struck by lightning, but having a hard drive go bad is actually a pretty common occurrence. I’ve seen hard drives go bad in the first few days of use and have some that are still going after several years. Trusting a hard drive is like playing Russian Roulette with your data. The gun might play in your favor, but you’re always playing with a loaded gun. You should always make SEVERAL consistent, reliable backups of your pertinent data and always use a surge suppressor or UPS with your computer. These are small prices to pay for the life of your data and is minimal considering how much is can cost to recover.