After bringing the failed drive back to life, as a data recovery professional, you know now you need to recover the damaged file system by using file system recovery software; and maybe you know also you need to do a disk imaging in order to work from an accurate, stable hard drive image.
Unfortunately, traditional disk imaging tools and methods are designed for and work on good HDDs only, not the patient HDDs that are unstable or inaccessible because of media defects and instable head, which are common challenges of Stage 2 in practice. Even more, with those traditional imaging tools, the time involved and the ordinary user-level repeated-read access to the media bring a risk of damaging the disk and head, making data lost irretrievable.
But now there's a better way: The disk probing equipment included in the Data Compass suite bypassing the disk-level problems such as multiple bad sectors, damaged surfaces, malfunctioning head assembly, or corrupted servo info, In the meantime you can use the default software or any other defined software you have been familiar with (R-studio, Winhex, any) to perform file recovery. Through the Data Compass, problem drives will become intact hard drives and ready for file recovery attempts..
What can Data Compass do?
Data recovery from physically damaged HDDs is what Data Compass designed for.
- Data recovery from HDDs with severe multiple BAD sectors, which appear because of platter surface scratch or malfunction or instability of the magnetic head assembly (MHA).
- Data recovery from HDDs that start to produce "clicking" sounds, which may be caused by corruption of sector servo labels or a MHA malfunction. If some heads or surfaces are damaged it is possible (before installation of MHA replacement) to create a copy of data using the remaining good surfaces or drive heads.
- Availability of tools for logical analysis of FAT and NTFS file systems in the software complex allows data recovery in cases, when a drive is functional and only logical data structure is corrupted.
- When used with malfunctioning drives, Data Compass complex often allows selective extraction of data necessary to your customers without reading all data from a drive ("recover data by file" without creating a complete disk image) saving a lot of time. In some cases, when drive malfunctions cause constant self-damage (like scratches on disks or instable MHA) these are the only means to accomplish this task. With the ShadowDisk technology adopted, users need not to worry about the drive degradation problem.
Examples of Data Compass Application:
