The LANtern Online

In the wake of the hurricanes:
Data recovery from water damaged disk drives

In looking at some of the news stories about Hurricane Katrina, I came across a transcript of a New Orleans television feature called "Digital Gumbo" hosted by MCSE Jerry Seregni. Jerry was interviewing Dave Mohyla of DtiData in Clearwater, Florida which specializes in data recovery and has worked for Cisco, Ford Motor Company, NASA, the United States Navy, and many others.

You can read the transcript here. It contains some very useful information about what to do -- and what NOT to do -- after your hardware has been swimming with the fishes. (For even more information about data recovery, you can go to the DtiData web site.)

In the same program transcript, Jerry also talks about the "lost local administrator password blues" -- Your company needs to setup a temporary office at a location spared heavy storm damage. After you determine which computers in your organization are "mission critical," you disconnect them, cart them to the other location, network them, and try to conduct business as usual. But you soon discover the local administrator password on a critical Windows 2000 or Windows XP box isn't known. As a result, printers can't be installed, users can't logon (they don't have local user accounts), and critical software can't be installed.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have us all thinking about disaster recovery scenarios. Now might be a good time to update your organization's plan -- and to get it approved by senior management while the TV images of a real disaster are fresh in their minds.

Will