SERVICES

1. Mechanical Recovery

Mechanical recovery addresses physical hardware failures inside storage devices—primarily traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). When internal moving parts fail, specialized hardware and environment controls are required to extract the data.

  • Common Symptoms: Loud clicking, grinding, scraping sounds, or a drive that fails to spin up entirely.
  • Core Mechanisms Involved: Read/write heads, spindle motors, drive platters, and actuator arms.
  • Key Procedures:
    • Cleanroom Environment: Physical disassembly must occur in an ISO Class 5 / Class 100 Cleanroom to prevent airborne dust particles from settling on platters and causing further damage.
    • Head Swapping: Replacing failed read/write head assemblies with matching donor parts from identical drive models.
    • Platter Swaps: Transferring magnetic platters into a new chassis if the motor has seized or spindle bearings have failed.
  • Primary Goal: Stabilize the hardware long enough to make a sector-by-sector clone/image using hardware imagers (e.g., DeepSpar, PC-3000).

2. RAID / NAS Recovery

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) systems spread data across multiple physical drives to optimize performance, capacity, or redundancy. Recovery becomes necessary when multiple drives fail, a controller fails, or configuration metadata gets corrupted.

  • Common Scenarios: Multiple disk failures in RAID 5/6, accidental array re-initialization, corrupted volume headers, or hardware controller failure.
  • Core Challenges:
    • Abstracted Storage: Data is striped across disks; individual drives rarely hold complete files.
    • Complex File Systems: Modern NAS devices frequently use specialized file systems like ZFS, Btrfs, XFS, or proprietary RAID abstractions (e.g., Synology Hybrid RAID / SHR).
  • Key Procedures:
    1. Image each healthy and semi-functional drive individually (never operate directly on original media).
    2. Determine array parameters virtually (stripe size, drive order, rotation offset, parity distribution).
    3. Reconstruct the logical array via software to extract the intact file system.

3. Firmware Repair

Firmware is the microcode stored on a drive’s Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and inside system service areas (System Area / SA platters or NAND microcode) that governs drive operations, defect management, and host communication.

  • Common Symptoms: The drive powers on without strange sounds, but is not recognized in BIOS/OS, shows 0 GB capacity, or displays wrong model names (e.g., “SATAFIRM S11”).
  • Core Causes:
    • Corrupted translator modules (which map logical block addresses [LBA] to physical sectors).
    • Overflow or corruption of defect lists (G-List / P-List).
    • Bad sectors forming within the drive’s reserved System Area (SA).
  • Key Procedures:
    • Accessing the drive via vendor-specific diagnostic modes (e.g., PC-3000 console interfaces).
    • Reading, repairing, or rebuilding damaged firmware modules in the System Area.
    • Regenerating damaged translator files so the controller can accurately map internal sectors back to user data.