It was one of those phone calls that you immediately know isn’t going to have a happy ending. An elderly friend, who is moderately computer-literate, was telling me how she had plugged in one of her USB backup drives, and that Windows was telling her that the disk wasn’t recognised, and would she like to format it?
Fortunately, my screams of panic down the phone persuaded her that saying “yes” to this dialog box would be a bad idea. And that the best thing to do would be to unplug it. We would collect it and see what could be done.
Do I mention at this point that I asked whether the data was on any other drive? I could, but you can guess the answer: no, it wasn’t. These were the only copies of these files. And shall we take bets that these were irreplaceable family photographs? Oh look, you win.
Having got the drive into my hands, I first confirmed that, yes indeed, Windows didn’t like the drive. Nor did a Mac laptop. Which suggested that something was quite amiss. At this point, it would have been easy to simply admit defeat, say that the drive wasn’t recoverable, and allow my friend to lick her wounds. But where’s the fun in that? Clearly there was more that I could do, if I was prepared to get deep down and dirty with the drive.
The first thing to remember is that it’s very easy to make things significantly worse. With a drive like this, you don’t know what the problem is or the
