Faulkner Legal Group |
Faulkner Legal Group was a legal firm in Winter Park, FL for several years, and our meeting was so odd, I simply must share the story.
One late Friday afternoon, I was at my computer parts wholesaler stocking up on supplies for a weekend job
and waiting in the checkout line, when I overheard the cashier tell a caller that they did not service computers -
they only sold parts. The caller must have been persistent as I next heard the cashier say, "No, I'm sorry sir. We don't
know anyone who can recover data from a crashed computer." At hearing this, I began jumping up-and-down while waving
my arms from the back of the line. I caught the cashier's attention and ran up with a business card. She told the
caller to call my number.
The Sun Reflects
Off Broom Handle
By the time I navigated Friday evening rush hour traffic and got back to my office, the answering machine was blinking
madly. I hit play, and sure enough, it was the caller worried about their crashed computer.
I returned the call and found myself speaking with David Faulkner, Esq., owner of Faulkner Legal Group. Apparently
there had been a power outage and when the power came back on, the computer didn't. I asked the basic diagnostic
questions and when I got to, "What do you hear?" I knew the problem. Mr. Faulkner heard the computer clicking.
A clicking computer generally means it is stuck in a boot loop with a damaged boot sector on the hard drive. This
also means that records that help a computer find the data on a hard drive were likely gone. To complicate matters,
I was told that all their court records was on that computer...AND, of course...there was no backup! This basically
meant that Mr. Faulkner's entire business was dependent on data that was lost on a crashed hard drive stuck in a boot
loop. Naturally, loss of this data would mean the end-of-the-world to my new client. I took Mr. Faulkner's address
and promised to be there as fast as traffic would allow.
At Mr. Faulkner's office, we powered up the computer and I only needed a second to recognize the boot loop click.
I shut down the computer and said I had to take it back to my office.
Back at my office, I removed the hard drive from Mr. Faulkner's computer and installed it in one of my workbench PCs.
Then I deleted the drive's partitions. Yup, this sounds scary, but it's what I had to do. Now that I had a blank hard
drive, I could run a low-level data reconstruction operation.
As I recall, I got the data recovery operation started around 7 p.m., Friday evening. By Monday morning, I had logged
about 40 hours of work BUT I had also restored over 98% off all the lost data and returned Mr. Faulkner's computer to his
office before the start of business Monday morning.
In the months that followed, I began the website project for Mr. Faulkner which includes designing the logo you see above.
I was in my garage one Sunday afternoon, when the sun reflected off a broom handle. I loved the color and texture,
so I grabbed my Nikon and shot a few photos. Back at my office, I used the Nikon pics to design the background texture
for the logo I was building for Faulkner Legal Group. Once Mr. Faulkner saw the logo design, it was such a hit, he
hired a sign company to duplicate the logo design into the wall sign you see below.