Crash!

IT'S a Salvador Dali version of a computer, a meltdown of charred weeping plastic with bits of twisted metal jutting out at angles. The monitor has flattened and fused to the 386's computer case, and welded into the midst of the mess is an unfortunate stapler which happened to be resting on the machine when the office burst into flames. The remains were carted off the premises in a body bag because the chemical stench was so foul.

The computer casualty is now - Exhibit A in the "Museum of Bizarre Disk-asters", the final resting place for Scott Gaidano's world of digital worst case scenarios, aka the computer exhibit from hell. There are pulverised PCs, laptops crushed by buses, and another which lay on the bottom of the Amazon for two days. But each mangled computer carcase is also a success story for Gaidano and his staff at his California data rescue company DriveSavers. In each case, DriveSavers was able to rescue all the data on the hard disk intact, much to the relief of nail biting clients who'd never got around to making a back up.

"I have the freak show of computer disasters," chortles Gaidano. "I could charge admission!" Instead, he carts the "museum" around to various trade shows and computer exhibitions across the US such as MacWorld Expo and Siggraph, and watches the punters roll in to the DriveSavers stand. Especially striking is the bubbling aquarium with the Amazonian Powerbook - people do a double take, then just have to walk over and find out more.

"What we specialise in is a complete recovery of a desktop," Gaidano says. "We want it to look like nothing ever happened at all." And despite the light heartedness of the roving museum, Gaidano is serious about his company's work, and understands that trauma isn't just something that happens to the disk.

Accordingly, his right hand staff member is Nikki Stange, whose job title is Data Crisis Counsellor. She used to work for a suicide prevention line, and finds the training useful. Customers ring their freephone number and begin weeping, or are hysterical, or frozen with terror. "I speak with customers when they initially call in, and go through the emotional crisis that accompanies a computer crisis," says Stange. "They need to come to terms emotionally with what has happened. People never understand what's going on in that box."

But the DriveSavers technicians do. Using a host of software and hardware which they've developed themselves. "There were and are no books, no classes, nothing on how to do this kind of thing," Gaidano says they somehow manage to coax out files when other places have told people to give up.

Working out of their offices in Novato, over the Golden Gate Bridge and north from San Francisco, DriveSavers begins by configuring a "rescue" machine to match the customer's machine. "So we have every board for every PC that's ever been made in these safes," Gaidano says, gesturing to row upon row of locked metal cabinets. "We have every hard drive ever made, every card, every configuration ever made." Sometimes he gets the bits from manufacturers, other times he just sees an old PC in a garage sale and grabs it.

For really tricky jobs, the company has its own "clean room", where the air is 10,000 times more particle free than outside. The drives are opened up and repaired by white suited technicians. "We just need to get it running long enough to get a recovery done," says Gaidano. And most of the time, they succeed. Mechanical parts might fail, or directories can get scrambled, but the needed files themselves are usually fine. Data rescue starts at about $ 125 for a floppy disk to a few thousand pounds for a major job. In most cases, the data can be recovered in under two days.

Scott Gaidano got into the business because no one else was there when he needed a bit of data rescuing himself. "I had one of the first Macintoshes that ever came out. I had a year's worth of information on a floppy," he says. He decided to head up to a mountain cabin for the weekend with a bunch of friends, and he put his computer and disk in the boot of the car.

"Well, we were driving up there and we were playing Creedance Clearwater Revival really loud," he recalls. "Then we got to the cabin and I turned on the computer and got this weird question mark." The speakers were set partly into the boot - and the magnetic field they generated erased his disk.

His customers' stories can be painfully funny. There's the woman who was unloading the boot of her rental car when the car hire agent reversed the vehicle over her laptop. Then there was the MacWorld Expo employee who reversed a shuttle bus over a Powerbook. But the most bizarre tale is that of the woman who lost her Mac Powerbook when her Amazonian cruise ship hit an underwater barge and sank.

"Two days later, and against all international salvage laws, she got scuba gear, went down to the sunken ship, broke into the bridge, went down two flights of stairs, and found her room," says Gaidano. She rescued three things: her contact lenses, her grandmother's wedding ring, and her Mac. DriveSavers rescued the data.

They've had plenty of big name clients: ABC News, Adobe Systems, Arthur Anderson, Eastman Kodak, Federal Express, Lucasfilm, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Smithsonian Institute, Warner Brothers,

Xerox. They've salvaged special effects for True Lies, Jumanji and the new in production Star Wars film. They rescued the last Rolling Stones video.

One wall of the company office is taken up with signed photos of grateful celebrity clients. Sting, for example ("He'd lost all his financial data and didn't know how much money he had in the bank"), as well as country singer Barbara Mandrell, soul musician Isaac Hayes, and the Muppets. After Drive Savers rescued 12 episodes of The Simpsons, they received a Simpsons family portrait, with Lisa explaining, "DriveSavers recovered 100 per cent of the data when dad spilled his beer in his hard drive!" A disgruntled Homer adds: "Yeah, but they only recovered 60 per cent of the beer . .