Cambridge is where you hand over the drive: either at the Vision Park drop-off or by post. Every single recovery then uses the exact same path in the same order on the exact same benches, regardless of whether the drive came from Newmarket, Huntingdon or Cambridge. The 'tour', therefore, is this: bench by bench, what everything is, what it does, and how all this will determine which recoveries succeed.
Write-blocking at intake, hardware imaging, firmware repairs, and a mechanical bench to open drives that need to be physically opened: each item goes through only the stations that provide the services it requires and bypasses the other stations.
The most important way that this work is different from work you may perform at home.
If your computer fails to read information from a sector on your hard drive when asked for that information, it attempts again. And again. And again. Because its purpose is to retrieve the information requested, and it assumes that your hard drive is generally healthy. When attempting to read a drive that is actually failing, your computer's repeated attempts to access and read information from a bad sector are what ultimately cause failure: hours of the heads being moved back and forth over a damaged section of the platter that they are unable to read.
Hardware imagers do the exact opposite. They are able to read data from a failing device one time (and note that it failed), move on, and come back to those problem areas afterwards with a different timing setting and different settings. If necessary, an imager can be told to skip ahead to the next section, read in reverse, or change how long it waits before giving up.
The difference in these approaches is why an imager often successfully acquires 99% of a drive that ordinary copying kills at 12%. Identical disks, identical failures, but vastly different methods of recovery.
A purpose-built hardware acquisition tool designed specifically for reading damaged media. This hardware does so without “hammering” the media being read. In addition, purpose-built hardware acquisition tools allow the user to determine the amount of time that will elapse prior to the reader giving up, as well as allowing the user to specify retry behaviour and head selection.
The physical opening of a hard disk drive allows for head replacement and platter work. Hard disk drives operate with sub-micron head-to-media clearances; thus, even a single dust particle underneath a drive's heads will score the drive's recording surface.
We use the manufacturer's technical engineering interfaces for accessing and repairing the service area modules loaded into memory upon power-up, as well as for accessing SSD controllers that have become unresponsive.
Programmers and test-point equipment are used for acquiring raw NAND bit patterns, followed by reversing the wear levelling, interleaving, and scrambling applied by the controller.
A hard drive is a small computer. It boots from code in the reserved service area of its own platters. It loads modules describing its geometry, defects on those platters and calibration values for its specific heads. If there are problems with these modules, the drive spins perfectly and reports nonsense, and no amount of software that can be run on your computer will help it.
The other half is adaptive data. Each drive has been calibrated at manufacture to operate properly with its own heads and platters. This information lives in a read-only memory (ROM) chip located on the circuit board. If you install a circuit board from another drive, the heads are being told to function in ways which do not match the hardware. Therefore, swapping boards does not work, and that's why the chip must be transferred instead.
Both are routine work here and neither is accessible through any application that you can install.
Only for mechanical problems. None of the electronic faults, firmware faults or logical faults ever need it, and most faults are one of those.
On a healthy drive with a logical fault, frequently yes, and we'll let you know when that is the case. However, on drives that are failing due to physical issues, the software will continue to keep them powered up and trying to find data for many hours. That's what eventually causes the failure of the drive.
This is because hardware imagers read from the drive only once and move on, whereas your computer continually tries to access the drive again until it ultimately fails. Also, a hardware imager is able to read firmware areas on the drive that a user's operating system has never communicated with.
No. All work (including mechanical repairs) and all chip-level reading are completed by our in-house engineering team. Your data leaves the UK at no time during this process.
We hold your drive for 14 days post-delivery in case anything was missed. Once that period expires, your drive is securely wiped unless you ask for it back or request its destruction sooner.
No. A drive that has been fitted with donor components is only good for a single read. It should never be trusted as a disk for future data storage.