The Immortality Plot

The Immortality Plot - chapter 8

Delaney acted fast.

He made San Francisco by the time the stores were opening up. The day was clear and bright and Delaney felt energized. He had a clear and present mission and the crisp weather suited his mood. He headed for a district just north of Fisherman’s Wharf. In a small, narrow, street that curved upwards in a steep incline was the small, specialist store where Maria had bought her computer. Delaney had been with her when she had taken delivery of it.

He was the first customer of the day and he ducked inside the low door carrying the cleaned wreckage of the hard drive. As far as Delaney was concerned, it was probably a lost cause but as he placed the pile of components on the narrow counter amid the clutter of monitors, hard drives and accessories he knew he had to check out every avenue.

A young Asian man came out to serve him from behind a stack of cardboard packing boxes.

“Hi,” he said, “how can I help you?” Then he spotted the charred remnants of Maria’s CPU.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “Fire damage.”

“Your name is Ashok, right?” asked Delaney. The young man looked surprised.

“Yes, do I know you?”

“No, I don’t think so. My wife bought her PC from you a couple of years ago and I came here with her. I just remembered your name, that’s all.”

“You have a good memory,” remarked Ashok. He touched the components delicately, moving them around the glass counter. “Data recovery, I presume?”

“What are the chances?” Delaney asked.

Ashok sniffed gently as he began to reassemble the drive into a more formal shape.

“Data recovery is imperfect,” he explained. “It looks to me as if most of the exposed circuitry has melted, and so has the IDE interface, the only way of plugging into a PC motherboard. In fact, several IDE pins are missing.”

Delaney waited patiently.

“It needs to be taken to a clean room to open up the drive and see if the head is damaged. The platters are caked with dust and smoke residue. It should take about a week.”

“What’s entailed?” asked Delaney and immediately regretted it.

“Hard drives are assembled in clean rooms which are even cleaner than surgical rooms in hospitals,” Ashok began, “and then they are sealed. Hard drive platters spin at a rate of 4,200 to 10,000 rotations per minute. Opening the hard disk drive to inspect the contents by anyone but properly trained personnel in a controlled environment could lead to contamination of the magnetic media. Damage can occur because the read/write heads move at a very close distance to the spinning hard drive platters. As the platters spin, it is only a matter of time before the head comes into contact with dust or debris on the platter. At this point, an impact will occur, the surface of the platter containing the magnetic media will become damaged and the data contained within this magnetic media will be lost forever.”

“I see,” said Delaney.

“I have a contact who is a senior data recovery engineer for Twenty-First Century Data Solutions in the Bay area,” said Ashok. “He can take fire damaged hard drives that need to be completely restored and extract data from them. They need to be rebuilt in what is known as a Class 100 clean room, a special room that is supposed to be 100 times more sanitary than a hospital operating theatre, in which there is no dust or lint or anything like that," he said. “People have to wear white gowns and hair nets. It's a HEPA-filtered, climate controlled room.”

“I see,” said Delaney.

“The hard drive’s platters, the rotating disks where data are stored, need to be made smoother than any surface on the planet so that information can be retrieved. Rebuilding a hard drive is like cloning it. That's because each hard drive is like a person's fingerprint. It’s unique to them. Every hard drive has a certain lot number, revision numbers, firmware codes, and we have to match all of that, by finding parts, as closely as possible to get the hard drive recovery completed," Ashok told Delaney.