Tour of Disklabs Data Recovery

Author: Ian Cunningham
Published on: 28-07-2004
Views: 26431


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The Tour

A tour of Disklabs Data Recovery and Forensic Services

One of the first and most interesting aspects of the tour was the clean area, basically an expensive unit that can create a workable environment with only a few parts per cubic meter of dust. This means that a hard drive can be opened and operated on safely, without the risk of dust landing on the drive platters.

Clean Facility Enclosure

To demonstrate the capabilities of the enclosure, a drive with a boot sector fault was opened up and connected to a powered up computer. The Drive heads could be seen to scan from side to side, and the platters spin at an incredible speed.

Hard Drive Operating Without Cover

Next on the tour came the more advanced hard drive recovery machines, there was a whole room full of these manned machines, working more or less constantly. Each machine had plenty of extra cooling for the hard drives, as the drive is stressed more than in normal usage (producing far more heat).

Recovery Computer

When a drive is brought in for recovery, all of the data on the drive is saved as an "image" onto a main server in case the worst should happen. Drives are then diagnosed into different groups, from boot sector problems to severe physical damage.

Backup Server

Located in another area of the building is a massive fibredrive server, holding a massive array of fibredrive disks.

Fibredrive Server