SC101 suddenly let you down? Need data recovery? How hard can it be, right?
If you were using an SC101 and now it’s not responding, you’ve just entered a world of pain. These very cheap SAN (Storage Area Network) devices from the excellent Netgear look like white toasters. You slot in two hard drives (like two slices of bread), connect it to your network, install special software on each machine that needs to access it, and SHAZAM you have shared network data storage.
While it all works it’s all great. But for you it’s stopped being great, you can’t see your files any more. Hey, no big deal, you’ll surf through Netgear’s knowledgebase for the latest firmware upgrade and maybe grab SFSExtract utility while you’re at it. Two hours later, you are a little tired and can’t see your data. Dammit, you need those files.
OK, you pull the hard drives out (because you’re pretty handy with PC hardware – that’s why you “built” your own network storage in the first place) and stick directly them into your PC one by one. What’s this? Windows wants to initialise the hard drive? But what about your data? Why can’t Windows see it? You try some file recovery software (even though your heart tells you it won’t work). Hours later – it’s not found a single file anywhere on the hard drives. Dammit switch the PC off.
You search the internet. You even try Wikipedia looking for a commercial SC101 data recovery solution to download. There isn’t one. Right. Time to get Dobby involved.
OK, so now you’ve bribed your uber-geek colleague from work with free wine and she’s having a look. She boots the PC with a Linux LiveCD. You have no idea what she’s doing, but she assures you your Window’s installation won’t be harmed. She can’t read your data – the drives “won’t mount”.
Aha! She says. I can use testdisk and search for partitions, recreate the partition table and we’ll be done! Nope. It doesn’t work. She pulls out the big guns: HexEdit – she’s going in raw without a safety net to hack the raw bytes. Oh. My. God.
But all she can see is nonsense. It’s like the hard drive has been encrypted. Or jumbled up by an alien technology with a sick sense of humour.
Long after she should have done, she gives up and goes home.
You’re exhausted and you are defeated. And you’ve run out of wine. No one is going to save you this time.
Actually, that’s not true. We will.
The hard drives in the SC101 (and SC101T) are formatted with a proprietary closed file system called Zetera Z-San FS. It’s patented. Given enough time and programming skills, you can assimilate the patent and reverse-engineer the file-system then extract the files and folders (or whatever’s left of them after the “recovery” efforts performed so far).
Don’t bother, we’ve already done it. Send us your SC101 hard drives and in return for money we’ll recover your SC101 data. Or clone your hard drives and send us the clones so you can continue to hack the originals. Race you. We’ll have recovered your files before you’ve worked out the SC101 mirror has disintegrated and you can’t figure out when or how or whether that’s even important.
We’ve recovered SC101 data from (among other places) Sweden, Slovenia, Australia, London, Isle of White and even Bathgate along the M8. See, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last. It’s a problem with no international boundaries.
The SC101’s dirty little secret is that when things go wrong they go very wrong and most owners eventually give up on their data. Then reformat their drives. Then start using the SC101 again – because they’re pretty handy with PC hardware – that’s why they “built” their own network storage in the first place…
Will we release our application? Nah. SC101 file system is kind of hairy. Still finding new kinks to code around and new combinations of failure. But can we get your data back? Yeah, reckon so. What else you going to try? Email us. You’ll be no worse off. I promise. You might even get all your files back.
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