It’s in Guildford where you pass the recovery work on to us: either directly via drop-off at the Guildford Business Park, or by sending your drive to us by post. All drives will go through the exact same stations and follow the same route, regardless of where they arrived from (e.g., Guildford, Woking, or Farnham). This is essentially our tour: What are these items? How do they function? And how does this process decide what recoveries will work?
Intake write-blocking, imaging on dedicated hardware, firmware repair and a donor-part bench for the mechanical jobs: each job goes to the required stations based upon the type of task being performed, while the other stations remain unused. In other words, we use a “tour” system.
The first station: protecting you from us.
Write protection: Prior to even attempting to read a single sector, every device is logged and connected via a write-blocker. After this point, the original cannot be modified, therefore nothing we do later has the capability of making the original item any worse than when we received it. Every action thereafter is completed using copies of the data.
Above everything else, this station is the defining feature of a true laboratory versus a person simply running software on their laptop.
A computer assumes every hard drive is operational; thus long time-outs, infinite retries, and constant background reading cause a weak drive to fail. Our DeepSpar imager replaces the computer’s “exchange” allowing it to read sector-by-sector on its terms; i.e., timing-out within milliseconds, rather than minutes; skipping damaged areas and returning to those areas last; and safe power-cycling of the drive if it becomes stalled. Additionally, with a multi-head drive, our imager will map out the individual heads and read each head individually, beginning with an initial scan of the simple/straight-forward sectors first, followed by targeted retries on the weaker sectors. We are able to cut out a failing head before it causes damage to the platter. Next to the DeepSpar imager sits our Atola Insight forensic workstation creating hash verified images that demonstrate mathematically that the original remained unchanged.
The read sequence has as much importance as the actual reading process. When we image a drive, we begin by pulling your most critical folders first. Therefore, should that drive fail before it is completed, you will have at least recovered those items that matter most to you.
There are many drives that sound completely normal yet produce no data whatsoever.
Every hard drive operates on its very own operating system: service area modules with translator, defect tables, head maps. Each is required for rendering spinning platter data readable. Should any be compromised you would then experience a “ghost” hard drive: one that is identified as 0 GB, reports the wrong model number, or simply continues to spin without providing any readable data. We use the PC-3000 to speak the engineering dialect of each manufacturer (Western Digital, Toshiba, Samsung, Seagate, etc.) in order to read the ROM and adaptive parameters, regenerate a defective translator, rebuild defect lists, remove dead heads from the head map, and to put a failing drive into a condition that allows the imaging bench to take over. This level of operation far surpasses anything available via Windows tools. This is not marketing hype; this is architecture.
Where we physically open up drives, and why the shelf stock is just as important as the skill.
Every time we swap heads and do work on a platter there has to be extreme caution taken, because if there were a particle of dust on the surface of the platters while they are spinning at 7,200 rpm, that small piece of dust could be considered similar to a boulder on a motorway. Our donor shelves (behind the bench) contain drives we purchased solely for parts. The drives are organised by firmware version, factory of origin and model family. In order to successfully complete a transplant, there must be a close match: the head-stack must fit the drive’s head map, and the donor board must contain the original ROM for the drive so that the drive continues to address its own heads. Therefore, being able to find a matching donor part on the shelf can make a huge difference between completing a recovery in one week vs. waiting on parts from a global vendor.
Each solid state failure has its own set of tools located at the same bench. This includes a NAND reader to pull data straight from the memory chip(s) when the controller fails. We also do monolith work on one-piece card/stick assemblies. Removing the chip(s) is only half the battle. You need to reverse engineer the controller’s own translation (removing the XOR), correct the errors (ECC), take the interleaved pages and stitch them back together into a single logical image. Only after reconstructing/stitching the raw data back together will you finally see any file/folder structure. No matter how you get the raw data, it gets rebuilt, checked file by file and then sent back to you. To see all this play out on real failures, the case files serve as both a working journal and documentation for the lab.
Never. That bench-to-bench walk-through is exactly what your device goes through, from receiving it until you receive it again: all engineering steps are completed here within our lab walls. Nothing is ever outsourced/subcontracted to another company/vendor. It’s a fixed policy, not just a marketing phrase.
Because no less expensive method will do this. A firmware platform like the PC-3000 costs five figures, plus several years of study/training to obtain results from; hardware imagers are produced in extremely low numbers for an extremely specialised trade; and a donor drive library represents thousands of pounds worth of drives which are held solely as sources of spare parts. This kit is the only reason difficult-to-recover cases can be recovered at all.
We invite you to visit us during weekdays (Monday to Friday), 9am to 5:30pm, at the Building 2, ground floor location where you may bring your unit(s) to be reviewed/quoted on. All recovery services are performed in-house using our own trained engineering staff, and never go out to a third party.
The initial station is free: we complete a diagnostic on your unit within 48 hours; once completed we produce a written quote prior to beginning any recovery.