Deep spar located in Ottawa, Ontario is a data recovery company
but not in the way that you might think like you can't just
Drop in with your dead hard drive and ask them to fix it for you
their business is
developing the software
Hardware and the techniques that are used by everyone from mom-and-pop shop technicians to huge
data recovery houses right on the other side of this wall is actually the classroom that they use to train police and
other government agencies on data recovery
So they sponsored our trip out here to do two things
one to show consumers how to save money on data recovery service and
Number two to show repair shops how they can dramatically improve their chances of recovery for their customers
Scenario one of hard drive failure is clicking and clacking noises
Sometimes without being detected by the system. Oh
Okay, this happens it's probably a physical problem
So if the data is important don't do anything
Unplug your drive and send it to a pro
immediately or your chances of a successful recovery will be dramatically lower or possibly even zero a
Pro is going to use tools like these and a laminar flow
workstation like this one or even a full-on clean room like the one that I checked out over at drive savers to
physically swap components into the failed drive from donor drives
Sometimes this needs to be done multiple times in cases where one bad part is causing the other ones to fail prematurely
They'll also use professional tools from companies like deep spar
So I didn't know it, but I was actually using disk imager 4 when I performed my own head swap in that video
Scenario number two is an electronics problem. Maybe a broken SATA connector or
a
Burned chip on the PCB could be causing the drive to not be detected by your system
the most common symptom here is
total silence
Now sometimes you will need to call a pro for this and if the data is mission-critical
You should always call a pro but for nice-to-have rather than need-to-have data
this type of failure actually exposes the platters of the drive and
Therefore the data to much less risk
So in some cases you can attempt a home repair if you're handy with a soldering iron now
DeepSpar had this whole demo
Planned for me the the TVS chip actually handles over current protection for the drive and can fail due to an external issue
so just
Removing it from the PCB can possibly brick the drive because you're removing the over current protection
But in many cases it can allow the data to be recovered if it's hooked up to a known good system and power source
But we are throwing that demo out the window because I brought DeepSpar an unexpected present
This is
Terran's personal dead hard drive that failed when we hooked it up to a
Faulty power supply cable while he and I were at the office late upgrading his system
Now he would likely be quoted three to five hundred US dollars
Minimum to fix this and since he's Terran and he doesn't remember exactly what's on it
He's not gonna pay that much to get it back. So we're gonna see how we do with a DIY grade repair. Yarek, you ready?
So what we're gonna do first is we're gonna verify the diagnosis now
I'm already pretty sure that we're gonna power up this drive
And we're gonna hear a whole lot of nothing
So that means there's a good chance that this is an electronics problem then
Okay, so we power down
Now unfortunately swapping out a PCB on a drive isn't as simple as going to the hard drive PCB store and buying one
Yeah
If only life were that easy, right?
Look at him. He's defeated. He's defeated
So eBay and Craigslist are your friends now, fortunately in Terran's case
He already had a donor drive that looks like it's gonna be suitable
So there's a couple things to watch for you need the drive model to be the same
so not just this drive model, but also this model number right here, so these look good and
You even need the PCB review
To be the same now these two are a slightly different color here, but that's not important
What matters is that they're both revision a and they both have exactly the same model
So these should theoretically be suitable
Okay, now we're at the point where most amateurs would screw up this kind of a recovery. They'd go. Okay
Well now we take the good PCB put it on the bad drive and bippity boppity off to the races, right?
wrong
data density on modern drives is so high that the
Manufacturing tolerances are nowhere near good enough that every drive will just work out of the factory
so they have to build in compensation and
Calibration that is unique to your individual drive
It's usually stored on a little 8-pin ROM chip that looks like this and that specialized data
Has to be brought over. So you want to show us how to
Desolder and resolder a ROM chip. All right, let's do it. Let's not screw these up. Which one's which?
D on this one. Okay, we're good
There's a pro tip right there my friends better to market first
Now we're ready to put the PCB back on and we can go test it, right? All right
Here goes nothing. It's not picking up. Do you want to have a look at it?
Okay, so unfortunately sometimes when you hook up to a bad power source, it kills more than one thing
So we fixed our PCB problem
But we're still getting this zero capacity
nonsense here and we're getting kind of like a chirping noise and
Jarek like drive whispered with the horse whisperer for hard drives over here and
Told me that what he thinks is that it's the pre amplifier chip. Is that right?
So that's a component of the drive head, which means that we actually need to dig a little deeper on this thing
We're gonna take it over to the laminar flow workstation and tear it apart
So what this station does is it uses a really thick filter here to pull all the dies?
and then you can take it out of the air and then you've got this constant flow of clean air so that none of the
Contaminated air around us can get into the drive
That's really important with how close the head is to the platter
Even the smallest speck of dust could cause catastrophic damage to the platter as it's flying over it
So now we're swapping the known good heads from the working drive
into our bad drive
And actually now that I come to think of it by known good
I have not actually tested this drive.
Presumably Taren checked it before he gave it to me.
If it helps at all for the tension of this situation,
I still don't know that this will actually work
the way we want.
I mean, we could have screwed something up, right?
What's your confidence level right now?
I would give it 80%.
That's not bad.
All right, let's go give it a shot.
So this is it, moment of truth.
I'm not superstitious, but I'm gonna cross my fingers.
I'm not gonna knock on wood though,
cause then we might like bump the drive.
Hey, no, I think we're gonna get it.
Now that's actually a really important point.
Just because we are able to read data off of this drive
does not mean that Taren can take it,
pop it back in a system and start using it again.
This is still a dead drive.
So what we're doing right now is we're pulling
a bit for bit copy of all of the data
off and we're putting it onto a new one.
We are imaging the drive at 97 megabytes a second.
Fingers crossed.
No, no, no, sorry.
Sorry, okay, so what, I have to do this
for another six hours?
Six hours.
Scenario number three is a firmware problem.
Now for unusual issues, deep knowledge
of hard drive firmware design and a professional tool
like a PC 3000 is necessary.
But the fees that you can expect to pay
to someone who can interpret
this matrix level stuff right here
would be anywhere from $500 to easily thousands of dollars
depending on the complexity of the problem.
The good news is that many common firmware issues
can actually be solved with pretty much a button press.
And that is where DeepSpar's tool, the RapidSpar, comes in.
Wow, this is taking a really long time to detect.
Drive still works.
Oh, here we go, well, hold on a second.
It's really, those are just- Yeah.
We've got three partitions.
We've got three partitions off of it already, though.
And then we're just waiting on-
The partition is still loading.
What a frustrating and tedious line of work.
But you get to deliver people their data back.
It's our customers.
Right, but someone gets their data back.
Someone.
So it only took five minutes.
There we go.
Okay, so now then we're good.
It's just that every time we have to plug in this drive,
it takes a long time to detect.
Oh, sure, yeah.
Let's see what happens when we try to copy files.
So wait, so everything is slow like this.
You're right.
Funny story, I was actually here two weeks ago,
but we lost part of the data from that shoot.
Last time we were able to show
that the data was transferring at such a speed
that it would take infinitely long to get it off,
meaning that the drive would be guaranteed to be dead
by the time we actually managed to recover anything from it.
But it's going even slower, why?
It's just getting bogged down,
doing something that it's not supposed to be doing.
So instead of giving us the data,
it's just kind of running in circles.
Eventually it's just not gonna identify whatsoever.
But we'll still be able to fix it,
because it's only a firmware problem.
So we are going to stop this process,
and we're gonna connect our drive.
And this is completely custom hardware and software,
is that right?
Correct, we rebuilt everything from this from scratch.
It's made in Canada as well.
We coded everything from scratch in assembly code.
The reason is that off-the-shelf operating systems
make certain assumptions about the hardware,
namely that it works.
So as soon as the hardware doesn't work,
it starts running into issues.
And that's why any software product
is going to get stymied by certain drive malfunctions.
Whereas when you build your own thing from the ground up
that expects problems,
well, you can have a different experience.
So what Serge is doing right now in their software
is he's running a diagnostic test on the drive
to determine what exactly the firmware problem is.
So this process takes a couple of minutes,
and what it's doing is it's going through
and it's finding any discrepancies
in the firmware of this drive
compared to what's supposed to be there,
and then it's overwriting them.
And that doesn't make it so the drive loses any data.
No.
No, okay.
So now all that's left is power down the drive.
Touch interface.
Nice touch.
Then, theoretically, we pop this guy
back into our drive dock here.
And now, oh, I thought I heard.
Sorry, okay.
We're on the drive.
Hey, there it is.
Oh, that's way faster.
Of course, though, the acid test is a file copy.
Can we get data off of this drive now?
Now that discovery process is going faster.
Hey, there we go.
This is much better.
Awesome.
Here we go.
There we go.
Fantastic.
So with the rapid spar,
we went from not being able to copy the data
at any kind of reasonable speed,
to now we are copying all the data off this drive.
Now, one of these guys does cost about $2,000.
So end users aren't expected to buy one,
but since it's so simple to use,
if you, the end user, can find a shop that has one,
you should expect to pay about 300 bucks
for a recovery that it can handle.
So, I mean, maybe that's still not worth it
for photos of that night of binge drinking or whatever,
but if your tax records and your will
are on your hard drive, it's worth considering.
In scenario number four,
we're gonna see another solution
that you can actually try at home,
and this time without any specialized tools.
All we need is a USB drive dock, our drive, and a computer.
So this is an example of logical corruption.
We're gonna go ahead and plug in our drive and power it on,
and you're gonna see something
that you might've seen before.
So this can be caused by accidental formatting,
viruses, or Windows errors.
See this?
You need to format the disk in drive D,
but hold on a second, I had data on this.
Okay, step number one, don't click format, cancel.
Then we're gonna use a software called RStudio,
but there are actually free options out there
that are somewhat similar.
We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna click on our drive here.
We're gonna double-click empty space,
and if it's not actually a hardware issue,
so no bad sectors, and look at this.
Here's all our files.
They are ready for recovery.
Fantastic.
This type of software can also help us
diagnose scenario number five.
So the thing is is that unless you drop it or something,
a hard drive doesn't generally go from working perfectly
to completely dead in an instant.
Read instability almost always comes first,
and these types of drives, these mostly dead drives
that haven't fully failed yet make up the majority
of the cases that get sent in for data recovery.
The symptoms of these drives can include
not being detected in the BIOS,
preventing the computer from booting,
spitting out random errors,
or just getting so slow
that you can't do anything with them anymore.
You shouldn't have any noticeable knocking or clicking yet,
and that's exactly the situation.
So we're gonna fire up RStudio here,
and oh, that's interesting.
Our computer is completely frozen up.
One of these partitions has shown up,
but this one's just not populated.
Here's a little Windows hack that you might be able to use
to get access to a drive like this.
All you need to do is start up the command prompt
as an administrator,
start up Windows' built-in partition tool.
Oh, I gotta, right, the computer's completely locked up.
I gotta power down this drive first.
There we go.
Now everything, see, now everything comes back.
Then we just need to run a command prompt.
Oh, there we go.
We've run a couple of commands,
auto-mount disable and auto-mount scrub.
With our tweak, what's gonna happen here
is that Windows isn't gonna try to load a drive letter,
and that's actually a good thing
because it can hang the entire operating system
while Windows tries to mount the file system,
and it'll try and then time out,
and then it'll restart and do it forever,
doing more damage to what is already a damaged drive
in the first place.
So now that we've done this,
we can open up Disk Management, and boom!
There it is.
There's our 300-gig drive,
and we can actually launch our RStudio software now
because the system isn't completely locked up.
In cases where the drive doesn't have a ton of bad sectors,
we actually can attempt a recovery.
That's looking pretty...
Oh, this is taking longer than it should.
So this is the point where, as a data recovery technician,
your gut feeling should be to stop what you're doing,
because we're only 17% of the way through,
and this drive has many bad sectors,
which are taking anywhere from one to three minutes
to detect each time.
Now, the problem here is that
this is a typical software behavior
where the drive encounters a read error,
and it just keeps trying and keeps trying and keeps trying.
This puts a lot of strain on the drive
and can cause it to fail right in the middle
of this type of recovery attempt.
We are gonna switch over to the RAPIDS bar
and talk about that method.
So all we're gonna do is plug our drive in here,
go ahead and power it up,
and then there are a couple of things
that might make us think that this, the RAPIDS bar,
is gonna work better than a standard computer.
For one thing, if it encounters a bad sector,
instead of reattempting and reattempting,
wearing out the drive,
it will actually cut off its reattempts
after a couple of hundred milliseconds.
This dramatically reduces the rate of error.
This dramatically reduces the stress on the drive.
For another, it actually borrows a lot of DNA
from their higher end products.
So this is the disk imager.
So when we set our source drive parameters here,
we select the brand and the interface,
and what it's doing is it's actually taking information
about the behavior of our drive as it scans it,
and it's uploading it to DeepSpar servers
where it compares it against a database.
Their server then sends our RAPIDS bar
some recommendations for how to deal with it
to help accelerate the recovery.
Pretty cool, right?
So we can double click partition one here,
and boom, we're running a scan.
So you can see here,
we already hit one of those bad sectors,
but instead of trying for two minutes,
it's only gonna try for a couple of seconds
before it moves on.
Now, we're never gonna get back any data
that was on those sectors,
but at least we can get back whatever's on either side.
So check this out.
We didn't get everything.
You can see there's some corrupted stuff here,
but even though this drive had hundreds of bad sectors,
instead of taking two minutes
every time it hit a bad sector,
this whole scan only took us about seven minutes,
much less wear and tear.
And there's some other cool stuff too.
For this trick,
we need a drive that is in much worse condition.
Let's go ahead and power this on.
That's the hard drive.
That's less fine.
That's not fine at all.
Ah, ah, turn it off.
But the RapidSpar has another borrowed trick up its sleeve.
So all we gotta do is plug this in,
but we're not gonna power the drive on right away
because we don't want it to start thrashing.
Instead, we're gonna let the software interface
power on the drive
and then start issuing commands to it immediately
so that it doesn't get a chance
to try to click itself to death here.
So it's powering it on,
and then hopefully we're not gonna hear a ton of clicking
because that would mean the potential for our dead head
to cause our other head to fail.
That's something that's really common.
Once you've got one head gone,
the other ones tend to follow suit.
Smart failed.
Okay, that makes sense.
Now in a moment here,
it's gonna start checking the heads and media.
We're probably gonna hear a couple of clicks here
because you can't check if the head works
without trying to move it.
Diagnostics are done now.
So 19% of our tested sectors do contain data.
There's something to recover here.
As we expected,
one of our three heads is at 46% health.
Now we're not getting back anything
that's on that platter with the bad head,
unless we do a head swap and put a new head in the drive.
So if this stuff isn't mission critical,
what we're gonna do is we're gonna build a head map here.
Then we're gonna disable that head
and see how much of the data we can pull off.
All we gotta do is click this,
skip anything on head one,
click apply,
and now we're getting a new sector map.
All right, heads.
Here comes our files and directories,
and boom, there it is.
File tree, baby.
Love it.
And through all this accessing,
you don't hear any clicks anymore
because that head has been parked
as long as we're using the RapidSpar.
So this thing is really cool,
but to be clear, the RapidSpar is also not magic.
So of the jobs that come into your shop,
some of them are gonna be solvable with software.
And then of the ones that remain,
about half of them can be dealt with with the RapidSpar.
And then the other half
are still gonna have to be outsourced to a professional
that's armed with more powerful tools
and probably a clean room.
So DiskImager 4,
along with the software that accompanies it,
allows very fine control
of things like the reattempt threshold.
It has a ton of configuration knobs
that a professional can tune
and can be used to work on drives
that the RapidSpar can't even interface with yet.
Like for example, a PCI Express NVMe SSD.
The RapidSpar is a very powerful tool.
It's a very powerful tool.
The RapidSpar can handle a regular SATA SSD,
which by the way, can have bad sectors as well.
So that's pretty much it.
So hopefully whether you're an IT manager
or you run your own shop,
or you're just an end user,
you've gained some knowledge
about the data recovery business
and how it works behind the scenes.
Now, of course, DeepSpar,
just wanna throw this in,
DeepSpar values your business,
but any video about data recovery
would be incomplete without a reminder
that in a perfect world, you wouldn't need it.
Please back up your data
because the DeepSpar guys would love nothing more
than to live in a world where no one loses their data
and they can just sit on a beach somewhere drinking cocktails
instead of hanging around with me all day.
So thanks for watching, guys.
If you disliked this video, you can hit that button.
But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed,
and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff
that we featured in the video description.
This would be a great addition to any tech shop out there.
While you guys are at it,
we've got our merch store,
a list in the video description as well,
and a link to our community forum,
which you should totally join.
You look very satisfied right now.
It's like, yes, this drive is broken
exactly the way I wanted it to be for this demo.