Flood Damaged PCs

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re4de2ye0

Limp Gawd
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Hello all! As many of you may know, central Indiana was hit really hard with flooding over the past weekend. My girlfriend's office was totally destroyed by about four feet of standing water inside the building at one point. My question is, would anything be worth salvaging? The cheap computers are not an issue but, the CAD designer's PC was pretty new. When we could finally get back into the office on Sunday, I went in and pulled all of the hard drives from the machines, muddy water was pouring out of every piece of equipment. I know that water doesn't necessarily damage components but shorts from electricity damage components. These machines were all still plugged in when I got to them, the power was of course shut off by the power company, so there is no way to know whether they were still on during the flood.

I was just wondering if it would be worth the hassle of cleaning and drying out every component individually, knowing that they were submerged in murky water for hours on end or just cutting losses and repurchasing. Along with the hard drives I also pulled some memory that was less than a week old in case it could be re-used. Anyone have any feedback or experience with this type of situation. Also what would be the best course of action as far as attempted data recovery from the hard drives? I apologize for the novel but this is a first for me and most information on the web suggests to just dry out and wait but nothing much in regards to data recovery. As always, thanks in advance.

-Dom
 
Okay, here's the deal.

You're screwed. I've done Flood DR before. Anything that wasn't offsite, is lost. You may get some salvageable components, but once you submerge a hard drive - especially in muddy or contaminated water - you're done. It collapses the air pocket between head and platter, and the inrush/outrush is more than enough to damage the armatures. To say nothing of the sediment that will be on the platters, and will pretty much immediately trash them. Sealed solid state components, e.g. memory, CPUs, some cards - will largely be salvagable presuming you aren't playing near a desalinization plant. (That means salt water.) ;) >70% or denatured alcohol baths for that stuff. Any and all fans, non-sealed solid state components and drives are total write-offs. Don't even bother trying on those.

EDIT: To clarify, a non-sealed solid state component would be e.g. a motherboard (exposed coils,) power supply (exposed transformers,) modem (exposed transformers,) and the like. Anything that is not purely surface-mount. Anything with larger aluminum sleeve capacitors (rather than sealed can AKA falsely labelled "solid state") is also a non-sealed component. Anything with large can capacitors is also likely to need replacing, even if it does work initially.
 
That for the reply AreEss, I kinda had a feeling that might be the case. I might try to at least see if the server drive might be salvageable because it was up off of the ground. The workstations on the other hand were pretty much on the floor so I held out little hope for them.
 
of course they are salvagable...


hope that company has deep pockets if they want the data
 
Well they are looking at about 80k in damages so tacking on a few more for data recovery (if possible) shouldn't be too bad.
 
Rule of thumb;
If it stayed dry, try. If it got wet, don't take the bet. Anything that was not under water should be usable enough to recover, but it is absolutely not safe for continued use due to moisture and mold damage.

OnTrack and various other places can recover the data, but it's a total disassembly of the drive in a clean-room, cleaning platters, and remounting them in another housing. Estimate your costs for recovery at a minimum $10,000 per drive if submerged.

I also should point out; tape isn't good enough here either. Unless tapes are offsite in a safe and secure location, you'd actually be in worse shape. Any LTO tapes or drives on-site would be completely unusable.
 
DAMN! 10K? Per Drive? Wow isn't that a kick in the pants! I think they might just be SOL on this one. The boss is on vacation right now, yeah what a great time to leave! So my girlfriend is stressing since she is currently in charge, she is going to be sick. Well that age old tale rings true, always backup off-site! I really appreciate the feedback here, this forum is the best.
 
The company has insurance, right? Thats usually who pays the 10k per drive in a flood, I would assume.
 
enginurd said:
The company has insurance, right? Thats usually who pays the 10k per drive in a flood, I would assume.
Click to expand...

Actually, this is the really painful part.
They don't. Most policies do NOT cover catastrophic data loss. In fact, almost NO policy covers catastrophic data loss; only catastrophic equipment loss. Meaning you can have all the hard drives you need, just not the data on them - that's your expense. Reason being, insurance policies presume you plan ahead and take reasonable precaution.

Now, that said, if the drives stayed dry, there is a good chance data can be salvaged off of them if great care is taken. They need to be immediately taken to a SAFE AREA. What constitutes a safe area? Hint: NOWHERE NEAR THE FLOODING. They need to be removed from the facility, in fact, anything that stayed dry needs to be evacuated to a clean, dry location IMMEDIATELY. The less humidity, the better - if you can get 10% or so, that's perfect. DO NOT WORK ON EQUIPMENT IN THIS ENVIRONMENT - YOU WILL WRECK SOMETHING WITH ESD! (Voice of experience.)
After 2-3 days of airing time, start recovery procedures one box at a time.

Also be prepared to be out of operation for at least two to three weeks, it takes time to cut checks and recover data. Do NOT begin recovery until you have replacement equipment ON SITE AND READY. (This also bit me once or twice - data with nowhere to put it.) Notify customers ASAP, if you have a copy of your customer list available. If not, do the best you can. Try to arrange call forwarding to a responsible party's cellular or other working phone from your primary inbound. If you can't, record a message - you will lose more business by not telling customers your facility got flooded out.
With luck, you may be back up to some extent within a week or so, but again, prepare for longer.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions I haven't covered; if not already apparent, DR is a significant part of what I do for a living, and I've done it before. I'll be glad to help as much as I can.

*tips NetBackup/TSM Administrator Hat* ;)
 
I really appreciate the help AreEss! I know I will probably be burning up your PM box in the coming days. I am already in the process of locating a new (temp) server for the company. It was just built and has had burn-in for about 24 hours. That will at least give them something to use. Employees will be working from personal laptops until new machines can be ordered and delivered. Thankfully it is a smaller company so there aren't 50 people with nothing to do. A new (temp) office has been rented and voice and data will be up and running tomorrow, all calls will be forwarded from the old number. That is about it for now, demolition on the old building began today, and I have the unenviable task of trying to recover anything I can from the drives.

Here is a rundown of the (temp) server I found locally for about $500:

Case
ARK 4U-500-CA Black Aluminum/Steel 4U Rackmount Case 3 External 5.25" Drive Bays
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811182566

Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-P31-S3G LGA 775 Intel P31 ATX Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128077

CPU
Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 Allendale 2.4GHz 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115032

Memory
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231122

Power Supply
Thermaltake Purepower W0129RU 600 W ATX12V Power Supply 115/ 230 V CE, FCC, UL, CUL, TUV certification
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153042

Video Card
Not sure what brand, just had it laying around. You dont need anything fancy for a server.
Has VGA + DVI outputs

Primary Hard Drive
120gb Western Digital WD1200

2nd Hard Drive
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152100

DVD Rom Drive
LITE-ON Black 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM IDE DVD-ROM Drive Model DH-16D2P-04
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106088

It's not going to blow anyone away but it will give them something to store files to as the rebuilding process begins. I figured for the price of a cheap desktop, it seemed like a decent deal.
 
Welcome to the joys of unplanned DR.

Now you get to convince your boss to invest in a proper backup solution including off-siting of tapes. I very highly recommend IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and the IBM TS3100 with a few Cristie BMR licenses. ;)
 
I will look into that for them. Any feedback on the server? I thought it seemed like a decent deal for the money. At least it is something that will get them by temporarily.
 
Honestly, I don't want to say anything on the server, because I do not do a lot of work in that particular segment. The more important thing is what you said, that it gets them up and running at least temporarily. :)
 
enginurd, I think you missed the point of the system - actually, I know you did.

It's not supposed to be anything great, or even good. It's an extremely cheap box in order to get the company operational again. There's no point in upgrading it, and absolutely no way whatsoever to justify spending any more money on it. It will be replaced (hopefully in short order) with a replacement for the flood destroyed server.
 
Bingo, I saw this deal on another forum and the guy happened to be local. So I figured what the heck, for the price of a cheap desktop, I can get them up and operational quickly. This weekend I am going to begin to work on the HDDs I pulled and see if anything can be salvaged.
 
AreEss said:
enginurd, I think you missed the point of the system - actually, I know you did.
Click to expand...

:eek: I thought he was building it out of parts because of the newegg links, so the suggestions I made don't add any costs -- they're simple swaps to more reliable, and sometimes even cheaper, parts.
 
No worries enginurd, I understood what you were doing! This guy was close, the server was built and readily available. Picked it up this weekend and it is working great. I really appreciate the feedback on the server. Now I get to start on the hard drives!
 
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