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Data recovery technology ... leading the market in hard disk drive data recovery

One of the most important stages in the data recovery process is to get an image of the drive. For this we use hardware specifically designed for imaging hard disks. This equipment is capable of reading failing hard disks quickly and safely, has built-in safety features so that no further damage occurs to the hard disk. We were proud to be asked to review this equipment by the manufacturer and were selected because of our world-wide reputation in the data recovery field. Our review of this equipment can be found on the ' Deepspar' website.

Electronics ... transplant or repair ... recover data

With modern hard disks, when an electronic failure occurs, it is not a simple case of swapping over the electronics with that of a good drive. Because hard disks can now contain so much data, absolute precision is required when placing read heads over the area on the platters to be read. During manufacture, each hard disk is fine-tuned and in many cases this 'tuning' data is stored in ROM, Flash Memory or encoded directly into the processor (embedded) during the final quality testing. In order to perform data recovery on these drives, we need to be able to identify the critical components from the old board and transplant them either directly to a good electronics board, or to read in the data and copy it to another ROM chip. In some cases, even this is not sufficient, so we then set about repairing the old board.

The picture on the right shows one of our soldering stations specifically designed for the clean removal and replacement of ROM chips and Processors from circuit boards..

Internal hard disk work ... clean room

All internal work is carried out in a class 100 clean air environment. In order to make sure the air is up to this standard, we use micro-particle monitoring equipment. The particle count for every job that goes into our clean air cabinet is recorded and we retain the records for at least 2 years, a serialised label is then attached to the drive which is traceable back to the original hard drive information (manufacturer, model number, serial number etc).

Hard disk firmware ... leading the field in data recovery

All modern hard disks have a firmware zone. This is an area that is not user accessible and contains proprietary information, defect maps, translation algorithms about defect tables, ROM overlays, SMART modules, Disk Serial numbers, parts lists of internal components, and a whole host of other drive specific information. Periodically, problems with a hard disk can occur within this zone.

To access this area of a hard disk, specialised hardware and software is required in order to make repairs. To do this, we use third party hardware and our own in-house developed software in order to repair the drive so that the data is recoverable. Some of our industry leading work has been on Fujitsu hard disks when severe problems struck their desktop range of drives resulting in corrupt firmware, and more recently with Seagate SCSI drives where we were the first company in the UK able to fix these drives. Many of our competitors have become our customers because of our technological advantage. We are able to fully access and repair the firmware zones on Seagate, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, IBM, Western Digital hard disk drives.