We take pride in being able perform hard drive repair and recover data from hard disks when other data recovery companies have failed.
DTI Data’s engineers collaborate with our research and development team to keep current with recent changes in hard drive technology and recovery techniques. Often our team develops new recovery methods before the new storage device is even released to the general public.
DTI Data knows how important your data is to you. We strive to improve our techniques each and every day to effectively recover data from any physically or mechanically malfunctioning hard disk drive.
If your drive is making clicking sounds or other strange noises, do NOT try any additional recovery attempts. A hard drive continuously run while in a degraded or failing state can lead to platter damage, possibly making recovery impossible.
In order to recover the data on the hard drive there is an area on the platters that must be read. This area on the disk is crucial to all drive functions, it is called the System Area. The following is a brief explanation of what the System Area is and why it is important.
The System Area is a reserved space dedicated to a hard drive’s own needs, such as: storing SMART logs, defect list at time of manufacturing, defect reallocation tables (grown defect list), program code (overlays), Max LBA (drives total size), head maps; all the information the drive needs to operate.
The EEPROM chip located on the PCB (printed circuit board) contains only a small part of the firmware; its primary role is to spin up the spindle and un-park heads so the drive can read the remainder of the firmware from the Service Area of the platters.
The System Area is not accessible with standard ATA commands; it cannot be read or written with any software because the data is unique for every vendor and drive family. Furthermore, hard drive vendors do not disclose any information about their hard drive System Area (SA) structure or how to access it.
Additionally, the SA is encrypted. To access the SA we use specialized tools to gain access. Gaining access to the System Area of hard drives has become more difficult as hard drive manufacturers have made an effort to encrypt and deter access to this area.
We have decades of experience in reverse-engineering the unique System Area structures of most hard drive models in order to recover the data.