Rescuing data from any machine – ResQstick

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I just heard from an old acquaintance, Dan Goodman, who’s been working on an interesting project. ResQstick, as the name implies, is designed to rescu
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Morty, Elly, SueW

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https://resqstick.com/pages/faq

How many times can I use ResQstick?
You can use ResQstick as many times as you like. Your initial purchase entitles you to rescue data from three separate computers. Should you need to rescue more PCs just contact support@resqstick.com.

I think this should be mentioned.

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Great Lake Bunyip

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So this stick allows anyone to walk into my home or office and steal everything from every computer as long as the computer will power on? Very scary.

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True, but as long as someone can gain physical access to your computer, you’re up the ol’ creek anyway. If a bad guy can boot to Linux, your data’s gone.

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Morty, Great Lake Bunyip, NetDef

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You could enable a BIOS password for booting, and a separate BIOS password for gaining access to the BIOS. Both passwords should never be the same. Many BIOSes have an option to create a USB stick dongle which must be plugged into the computer in order to boot.

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GoneToPlaid wrote:
You could enable a BIOS password for booting, and a separate BIOS password for gaining access to the BIOS. Both passwords should never be the same. Many BIOSes have an option to create a USB stick dongle which must be plugged into the computer in order to boot.

Yep, and that would probably slow me down, but only as long as it took me to open your case and connect your drive to my laptop.

As woody correctly observed: “as long as someone can gain physical access to your computer, you’re up the ol’ creek anyway.” Unless your data is (properly) encrypted, if I have physical access to your computer then I (can) own your data.

Lessons to be learned:
1) Physical security is an important part of information security
2) Good encryption is a good thing

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anonymous wrote:

So this stick allows anyone to walk into my home or office and steal everything from every computer as long as the computer will power on? Very scary.

Bitlocker is your friend . . . 

And from what I can tell, this USB stick/tool does not support it.  It would see a blank raw partition (guessing here.)

 

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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I wish it was as easy as the first ad on the web site suggests. First problem the end user is going to have is getting the flash drive to boot if UEFI/BIOS is not set to first boot from USB. The days of pressing F12 to select a boot device are long gone for many PC manufacturers.

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If your hard drive is encrypted, normally those rescue disks won’t work, so there’s that.

Woody, how does this compare to Hiren’s Boot Disk? That’s my normal go to toolkit for computer rescue…

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Hm, yeah, nothing about encrypted disks in there. Nowadays that should mean that at least BitLocker with a recovery key should be supported, right?

I do find it remarkable that to fulfill the promise of “all Windows computers from 1998 until today”, this would have to be a multi-architecture boot stick, x86/amd64/Itanium/Alpha/PReP/MIPS/Arm at the very least. (NT 3.51 on Clipper and SPARC was apparently dead by 1998? PC-9821 may be close enough to x86?)

I mean, was about 2006 when I had to do data recovery on an Alpha workstation… and not sure if the PReP box with an USB slot could even boot from the USB at all, been a while.

 

Good if it works, but I sort of expect that it’s mostly just the most common 99.999% of systems that this thing works on. I mean, just all the different kinds of RAID adapters that you can find in the odd server… even in small businesses that can be stingy about paying for recovery, and since there was nothing about excluding servers…

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johnf

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Just a note about Hiren’s: The original version hasn’t been updated since 2012 so it’s usefulness on Windows 10 machines might be questionable. However, an organization of enthusiasts has taken on the project and updated it. (They also have the older versions available for download.)   https://www.hirensbootcd.org/about/

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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johnf, SueW, NetDef

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Bad actors can get to your data anyway, whether they have this or not. This device makes data recovery accessible to non-geeks. This is a good thing for those people who don’t have a clue how to work on their own computer.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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johnf, Morty, NetDef

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+1

Many very competent people looking down on a device to help the otherwise helpless. Those that by definition had not done any of the preparation, and fall back protections in advance. This is what causes some novice users a stifling amount of embarrassment. To the point they do not seek help at all. Then lose pictures of their grandkids because they could not bring themselves to ask.

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SueW, Morty

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IMHO, still not a substitute for a good image backup regime!

It won’t help you if :

1. Your HD/SSD electronics are blown.
2. Your Master File Table is corrupted.
3. Malware has encrypted your hard drive.
4. Etc.

Nothing like good Images. Also a good external USB HD adapter, I use one by iDsonix, that accepts 3.5 & 2.5″ HDDs & SSDs. Then if the machine won’t boot just yank the drive plug it in and load to new machine.

I fear tools like this tend to give users a FALSE sense of I can always recover it…I’m just sayin’.

[Rant]

Reminds me of how my father wouldn’t let me drive a car until I could change a tire, change a wiper blade, and understood what the control panel was telling me. If you’re going to use understand how it works at the basic level. Backups aren’t brain surgery, rocket science, or even computer science. It’s like changing a tire, something you need to learn to do if you are going to use the device.

[/Rant]

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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NetDef, Elly

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And yet . . .  I wish I had thought of and brought this to market first!  Consider the target demographic they have – this could be a gold mine.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Any Linux Mint ISO does the trick for free.

The drivers are mostly all in the kernel, NTFS support is there (although I’ve been having trouble accessing Win10 NTFS partitions) and there are a good lot of recovery tools in there.

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I assume this just some kind of wizard-based thing…?

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For the market these guys are targeting, it looks like a reasonably priced solution.

Yeah, we know it’s likely not quite as easy as they make it sound (user needs to know how their old computer accesses the boot selection screen – F9 or F10 or F2 or DEL depending on the BIOS.)

But still, try finding a commercial grade file extractor for that price that doesn’t require the user to know how to make their own bootable USB or CD/DVD source!

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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This is most likely a Linux boot USB stick. For compatibility use a 32 bit version. However, I do not remember my 1998 vintage PC being able to boot from a USB. Having a few scripts or search routines to locate the files you want to save with a button on the interface would make it newby friendly. This could be via specific directory search or file extension searches.

I have used a Linux live CD or USB to access files on PCs that will not boot into Windows, or to replavce corrupted files that prevented booting by throwing a BSOD, but are sound hardware-wise. Very handy.

The challenge would be if the files are not where they ‘should’ be by default. I once had a colleague whose laptop was getting slow to boot or search. When I checked it out after virus scans, etc., I found thousands of images, documents and extracted program setup files all mixed together in C:/, or the root. Apparently, the term “save to C:” was taken literally. I moved all the files into directories and moved the extracted files to temp directories. Those were deleted if there were no programs installed and after asking about the use.

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Sounds like a practical tool to have around, just in case…

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Sounds like something I could need in the future.
My OS is Win7, computer knowledge very basic.
Unfortunately, ResQstick doesn’t ship to Canada…
Andre

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It would actually be nice if there would be some kind of installer that makes a bootable stick of any usb stick. That way, only downloading would be enough. Connect a usb-stick, run the installer and finished. That way, the stick would be easily updatable too.

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You are describing a set of skills that is not in the target customer base.

What you describe is already widely available from any number of linux sources. When downloading through a Windows system I like to use Rufus to create sticks.

This product could easily update when plugged into any functional system with an internet connection. But its useful function is to boot doorstops. Provided the doorstop has a USB port within the hierarchy of boot devices before it became a doorstop.

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johnf

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