When everything depends on a bootable medium

The Western Digital Raptor from the endoscope in the cleanroom. After replacing the defective read heads, CBL Data Recovery still had to deal with over 1,000 read errors before a bootable clone could be created.

In two cases, CBL Data Recovery was able to save expensive medical technology from being scrapped. An X-ray machine and an endoscope with a camera and accompanying computer unit were rendered unusable after their controls failed. In both cases, CBL managed to reconstruct the systems to be bootable from the defective hard drives. While normally only data is reconstructed, for old machine controls for which there is no longer support from the manufacturer, the old operating systems and applications must be completely cloned.

"Both cases came to us through IT consultants from Saarland. One data loss victim was a hospital, the other a dentist. In both cases, defective read/write heads caused the data loss. After their replacement, it took a lot of patience to clone all system files despite severe read errors and to create bootable replacement drives that the machines would accept," explains Yang Yu, Managing Director of CBL Data Recovery GmbH.

Over a Thousand Read Errors

The older endoscope from Karl Storz was an irreplaceable "unicorn" among the devices at the affected hospital. The machine control of the diagnostic device started from a Western Digital Raptor. Replacing the read/write heads of these high-performance drives, built until 2015 and running at 10,000 RPM, is not always successful, as Mr. Yang admits, but in this case, the hard drive was revived. However, it showed more than a thousand read errors. Over more than half a month, the drive was repeatedly read back and forth at reduced speed until the number of read errors dropped below 50. Finally, the forensic clone of the hard drive booted, and the data recoverers knew they had succeeded.

Yang Yu, Managing Director at CBL Data Recovery GmbH, says: "Reconstructing old device controls is extremely labor-intensive, but of course worthwhile compared to purchasing a new X-ray device or other expensive machinery."

Saved a Lot of Money and Work

The relief among the customer was great because system restoration through cloning the hard drive was the last chance to keep the device with its measurement equipment, which was needed for an ongoing research project, operational. A failure of the prototype would have set the research group back by years, as the exact same experimental setup is a prerequisite for results that can establish the method developed by the researchers. The comparability of the results can only be achieved if calibrated laboratory technology based on the exact same methodological setup is available. A comparable device would have had to be reconstructed at a high financial cost of well over 60,000 euros.

Old OS, Old Technology

For the X-ray device of the dental practice, the operating system to be reconstructed was Windows NT, and a suitable IDE hard drive was needed as a replacement. Fortunately, the data recovery lab had suitable drives in stock. Here too, after replacing the read heads in the cleanroom, a read error caused problems: just one, but in the boot sector. Patience and manipulations also led here to providing the customer with a fully functional replacement of their device control.
"Normally, we recover data and not operating systems – the user would simply reinstall it otherwise," says Yang. "Reconstructing old device controls is extremely labor-intensive, but of course worthwhile compared to purchasing a new X-ray device or other expensive machinery."