When startup founder Alex needed critical files from a heavily reformatted, 10-year-old MacBook Pro, he turned to DriveSavers. Their expert team tackled the challenging recovery, retrieving vital emails, iMessages, and documents previously thought lost. With custom solutions and quick turnaround, DriveSavers delivered beyond expectations, providing Alex with the data he needed to resolve urgent matters.
Gene Roddenberry’s Estate – Star Trek
Gene Roddenberry’s Estate - Star Trek
Client:
Gene Roddenberry’s Estate
Device Type:
Legacy Computer System
Turn Around:
Enormous Amount of Time *
Profession:
Television Program Producer, Screenwriter
Location:
Santa Monica, California
Going Where No Data Recovery Lab Has Gone Before
Gene Roddenberry, the man who masterminded the popular show Star Trek, passed away in 1991. It wasn’t until much later that his estate sent DriveSavers nearly 200, 5.25-inch floppy disks on which the Star Trek creator’s work was stored.
Problem
The “Star Trek” creator floppy discs could not be read on any commercially available computer and software.
Nearly 200 5.25-inch floppy disks from the late 60’s, used on custom-built computers with custom-built operating systems and a special word processing software that prevented any modern method of reading what was on the disks, were sent to DriveSavers for Data Recovery.
Solution
After receiving the computer and the specially formatted floppies, DriveSavers engineers worked to develop a method of extracting the data. There was no user manual for the computer, nor was there any technical documentation to help guide them.
It took over three months for the DriveSavers engineering team to develop software that could read the disks.
Summary
The engineers were able to crack the unusual formatting, reading the nearly 200 disks was tedious work that took the better part of a year to finish.
After months of painstaking work to recover files that hadn’t been seen in over 30 years, the question remains, what was actually on the disks? Lost episodes of Star Trek? The secret script for a new show? Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?
Well, that’s confidential.
When DriverSavers was contracted to recover the data, we were also bound by rules of confidentiality. PCWorld and other media reached out to the Roddenberry estate but was told it had no comment on the data or its plans for the newly discovered writing of Gene Roddenberry.
*DriveSavers Standard Turnaround times are 1-2 Business days, Economy 5-7 Business days, and Priority 24/7 service – on occasion, unique substances require more time and are approved by the customer.
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