Posted by Gurdip Singh on April 29, 1999 at 06:21:34:
Hi Fraser Howard,
April 26 was the worst day in the short life of my company, Media Genesis. With less than 10 days
to go to publishing a book that was vital to our company's survival in the economic downturn that
Singapore and the rest of Asia is facing currently, the Chernobyl virus struck my collegue's PC. It
showed classic symptoms of the attack: PC couldn't boot, and the data on the hard drive was wiped
out. And we didn't have a backup! That was stupid of us, being IT people!
Anyway, I spoke to dozens of technical people in Singapore as well as around the world to find
some way of retrieving the data, but they all had this to say: "it is gone"; "it is irretrievable"; "once it
strikes, there is nothing you can do...". Some of this came from "experts". I was advised to reformat
the hard drive and carry on with my life!
Well, I'm not very good at heeding such advice, so I persisted. Finally, I came across a small
company in Singapore that said that they do data recovery from virus attacks, so I contacted them.
That was on the evening of the 27th. Today, a couple of days later, I have the recovered data on a
diskette. The data is recoverable in "up to 80-90%" of cases; that's what these people have told me.
And they are happily making big bucks at the moment.
Please advice your readers not to heed any advice on formatting their hard drives if they have lost
important data as a result of Chernobyl. Data can be recovered. I'm not a technical guy so I don't
know how it's done, but if anybody asks for a contact, write me and I'll give you the data recovery
company's phone number in Singapore.
Regards,
Gurdip Singh
Manager
Media Genesis
Singapore