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Hard disk firmware is the information that is used by the computer that allows it to correctly interact with the hard disk.
When a hard drive is no longer functional within a computer or external device, it is generally down to one of three things:
1. Software Error / Data Corruption – data is lost
2. Hardware Error / Hardware Fault – hard drive not found
3. Firmware Error / Firmware Corruption – hard drive not recognised.
Firmware failures in need of repair due to the damage or corruption of the Firmware that controls the hard disk drive.
An example of an occurrence of firmware damage is often seen in Maxtor drives. The drive is either undetectable or is only seen by its family firmware name. This is due to the corruption of service data located in the firmware zone.
At start-up, a hard disk loads the service data from its firmware zone into RAM and then allows the drive to report on readiness. If there is damage to these modules then the drive will report either it’s family identity or will not detect at all.
Maxtor hard disk drives are almost always able to be repaired to produce a near 100% recovery of the data from the drive.
The engineers at Disklabs Data Recovery and Computer Forensic Services use specialist equipment in order to connect to a drive thus enabling them to view and repair the damaged firmware, which in turn will allow them access to the damaged drives contents and allow a complete image of the drive sector-by-sector to be made ready for the data to be recovered.
Once this stage is completed, software repairs are then initiated. Software repair does all the logical repairs that are required to make the data available readable again.
At this stage, a file listing is produced for the client. This is a list of all the files that are recoverable. These files are sent to the client for inspection and approval. Once the client has approved the data that has been recovered, the data is transferred onto appropriate media suitable to the clients needs, (this can be recovered data placed on CD’s, DVD’s, hard drives, external hard drives, memory cards or even emailed directly to the data recovery client. If the client wants the data shipping back to them, it is done so by insured courier on a next day service unless the client wants an emergency service, when a same day direct insured courier is used.
It is worth noting, that once the drive has been imaged we will then treat the image as the master and work with copies thereof. Disklabs Data Recovery and Computer Forensics Services never work with or upon the faulty drive once an image has been obtained due to the instability of the damaged media. |
