Technical White Paper for Data Compass 2011

Background:

Data Compass, as one hardware and software complex data recovery tool, was
designed to recover data from patient hard drives which are either logically damaged
or physically damaged and was released initially in 2008. Since Data Compass was
launched into market, it has been updated for many times, adding several important
functions, such as Shadow Disk technology, SA Emulation technology for Hitachi hard
drives and Reading by Selective Heads, these technologies have helped to solve many
data recovery barriers and create good profit for the customers using Data Compass.

As the advancement of hard drive technology, manufacturers of hard drives have

been introducing some new technologies into hard drives and have released TB-level
hard drives to meet the new demand of market, however, there are still many
malfunctions and firmware damage from these hard drives, especially the TB-level
ones, due to some design defects. Since November 2008, there had been successive
news that an escalating number of Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA and DiamondMax
22 drives were failing due to a fatal flaw in the firmware which caused the drive to
suddenly lock itself up and prevent the BIOS from even detecting it in the system.
(SalvationDATA provides solutions for these firmware problems in Seagate hard drive
recovery resolution) According to the Seagate, these firmware problems can be fixed
by updating firmware from its official website. This was the famous Seagate
Firmware Problem. Although Seagate had updated the firmware of Barracuda
7200.11 and launched Barracuda 7200.12, yet there were some malfunctions from
the two series. One of these malfunctions was falsely locked up, which means the
hard drives were failing when encountering bad sectors and reporting “it is ready”,
while these hard drives failed to refresh.

In the first quarter of 2010 Western Digital manufacturer outnumbered Seagate sales
and ranked first in terms of shipments, partly because of the Seagate Firmware
Problem. But the shipments don’t mean that the hard drives of WD are totally
perfect in quality. In recent years the ROYL Series of WD had been reported to be
defective in design. Just the same as other hard drive manufacturers, WD designs
two pieces of firmware. The two pieces of firmware are stored successively in logical
head 0 and logical head 1, for there are more than two heads of hard drives.
However, the status of each head is to be detected after powering on, therefore, in
case that any one of the two heads is damaged, the hard drive cannot be initialized
and motor fails to rotate, making clicking noises. Consequently, users must exchange

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the magnetic component parts in order to recovery data from these firmware
malfunctions. But the cost of exchanging the magnetic component parts is relatively
high, for most hard drives are with capacity of more than 500 GB, what’s more, there
is still possibility that the hard drive cannot work well after exchanging the magnetic
component parts.

SalvationDATA is to release the Data Compass 2011 to fix the above two problems
and any other difficulties during the data recovery application, adding 7 new critical
functions, which are head firmware loading technology for WD hard drive, power
reset setting for Seagate hard drive, reading by selective head for Toshiba and Fujitsu
hard drive, status register and error register, hard drive information acquisition
technology, real-time sector view during imaging, and access to Toshiba and Fujitsu
hard drives. And each of them is explained in details as followings.

Status register and Error register

The status register and error register function is updated in order to make users find
out the real time status of hard drive and know the type of error easily, by adopting
the users’ suggestions. Figure 5 shows.

Figure 5
7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
BSY DRD DWF DSC DRQ CRR IDX ERR
Table 1
Table 1 shows each mean of the status register in each Bit
BSY —— Abbreviation of Drive Busy
DRD ——Abbreviation of Drive Ready
DWF ——Abbreviation of Drive Write Fail
DSC ——Abbreviation of Drive Seek Complete
DRQ ——Abbreviation of Drive Request
CRR ——Abbreviation of Correct
INX ——Abbreviation of Index
ERR ——Abbreviation of Error Received from the drive’s error Register

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
BBK UNC 0 IDNF 0 ABRT TONF AMNF
Table 2

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Table 2 shows each mean of the error register in each Bit
BBK—— Abbreviation of Bad Mark Block: A bad sector mark was found in the ID field
of the sector or an Interface CRC error occurred
UNC—— Abbreviation of Uncorrectable Data: An ECC in the data field could not be
corrected (a media error or read instability)
IDNF—— Abbreviation of ID Not Found: The required cylinder, head, and sector
could not be found, or an ECC error occurred in the ID field
ABRT—— Abbreviation of Aborted Command: The requested command was aborted
due to a device status error
TONF—— Abbreviation of Track 0 Not Found: Track 0 was not found during drive
recalibration
AMNF—— Abbreviation of Data Address Mark Not Found: During the read sector
command, a data address mark was not found after finding the correct ID field for
the requested sector (usually a media error or read instability)

Power reset setting for Seagate hard drive

This function is added to fix the problem that the hard drive is stuck easily during
imaging but neither soft reset nor hard reset works and the hard drive must be reset
manually by user. This solution orientated from one customer using Data Compass to
recover data from Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive of 320 GB capacity. Our researcher
analyzed the hard drive and drew a conclusion that the hard drive is locked up when
encountering bad sectors but BSY is not still reading “1”, keeping the status of
“before locking up”, therefore Data Compass cannot recognize the true status of the
hard drive, resulting in not actuating “soft reset, hard reset and power reset”. It is
caused by the defect in design. According to the ATA protocol, the status register
should be “1”, when hard drive is locked up and fail to carry out external order.
Therefore, in order to be in conformity with this protocol, our researcher adds
‘power reset setting’. Users are able to specify the status register bit to reset the
power.

The real status of the hard drive must be identified by users when it gets stuck if you
are going to use this function, by testing whether each status register in each Bit is
effective or not. Here this function is demonstrated by the Barracuda 7200.11 hard
drive mentioned above. (For detailed approaches, please refer to the corresponding
video in the installation package)

Two partitions can be opened before specifying the condition of power reset, as is
shown in Figure 6.

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 Figure 6
At this time, the status of hard drive reads “error”, while all lights of “DRD”,
“DWF”,”DS”, “ERR” are on in Data Compass control panel, and it is shown in Figure 7.
And then if you view sectors, Data Compass reads “4040”, and it is shown in Figure 8.
It results in failing to access to SA, for the hard drive has been stuck and failed to
execute external commands.

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 Figure 7

Figure 8
So we have understood from above the effective bits for the status register after this current hard
drive gets stuck and we need now to specify the condition to reset the power. As shown in Figure
9, tick the ‘on’ lights “DRD”, “DWF”, ”DS”, “ERR”, click set and after that, the third partition can be
opened as well as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 9(After the power reset, DWF changes to DRD)

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 Figure 10
This function is able to well solve some Seagate 7200.11 and 7200.12 drives when they report
falsely ‘ready’ while they get stuck. SalvationDATA so far has found the problem with Seagate only,
if you find other HDD brands with the similar symptoms, you can try this function too.

Access to HDD info

DATA COMPASS 2011 is able to access to the HDD info like model number, firmware number,
series number, LBA value as well as the cache size. This function has been integrated to “firmware
loading” tab, it is designed to go with the function of “WD HDD firmware loading”, so that users
can judge whether the HDD configurations are right or not.

Western digital HDD firmware loading technology

This cutting-edge technology is aimed to solve that WD ROYL hard drives cannot be booted when
one of the main heads fails to work. This malfunction usually has following symptoms: power on
the HDD, the motor spins up, the heads starts seeking and give “cackling” sound, the motor stops
after trying two or three times; now the HDD works at PCB mode, and it still reports ready. Thus
we connect the HDD to data compass and HDD info will be detected as figure 11 shows. We can
see that only HDD model are detected, while there are no values in firmware number, series
number, LBA value as well as cache size. It proves that HDD firmware has failed to load and the
HDD model is acquired from PCB. Then, we click on “load primary head” (it is secondary head
malfunction in this case), it is to load firmware from the primary head and restore. Now the
program detects the HDD info as figure 12 shows. Till now, HDD has been booted from the
firmware loading of primary head and finished initialization, and all the HDD info are detected

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correctly.

Figure 11

Figure 12
After the successful firmware loading, we enter “Data Compass Explorer” and open partitions
successfully as shown in Figure 13.

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 Figure 13
We can see that this HDD has six heads, and one is damaged, theoretically, there are 83% of the
data which is retrievable. We can check the directory first and extract the important data.
However, considering of data security, we may adopt selective head image technology first to
extract the data on the good heads so as to protect data loss from the full-scale operation on all
the heads (good and bad). As figure 14 shows, after the head map was created, we disable the
logical head 1(H1), then image the data on the left five heads, so that 80% of the data are able to
be retrieved (the theoretical percentage is 83% without considering bad sectors of the patient
HDD). And it is likely that most of retrieved data are the wanted one. In such case there is no
need to swap head and we got the important data back, it means you can save a lot without
dismounting the HDD to change head. It is a powerful and practical technology if the data is not
so important and customers are not willing to spend much money on head swapping, thus we
only need to load firmware from appointed primary head, and then recover data by selective
head image. Meanwhile, we found that some heads are not actually damaged, but the
performance is degraded. And you will found the originally unstable head works well now after
performing selective head image. Partly because that the head stack is a whole, and unstable
head and good head works together in the process of selective image, as a result, the process
leads the original unstable head to a good status.

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 Figure14
Note that not all the head damage cases can be solved by firmware loading technology. Because
there are two copies of WD firmware, one is stored on logical head 0(primary head), the other is
on logical head 1(secondary head); if both the primary head and secondary head are damaged,
you may not use this technology because there’s no firmware stored in other heads. Therefore,
users need to make a diagnosis of the HDD and see whether it is a case which can be handled via
head firmware loading technology. Users must notice that firmware loading technology is only
applicable to cases with such symptom: power on the HDD, motor spins up, the head starts
seeking and gives “cackling” sound, motor stops after trying two or three times.

PS: Within DC2011, the Hitachi SA Emulation and western digital head firmware loading are
integrated to one tab. Meanwhile The Hitachi SA emulation has been optimized here. We have all
the Hitachi HDD sources integrated (including the latest series 7232,5450 etc ), and the original
HDD sources tab altered to “ auto loading”; therefore, users don’t have to select the HDD series
but only to click on the “auto loading” and then the program will detect the HDD info
automatically and load the corresponding firmware resources.

Access to HD doctor for Toshiba and Fujitsu

This access allows DATA COMPASS program directly accesses to the HDD on the HD doctor for
Toshiba and Fujitsu terminal and then extracts the data after the firmware repair. It makes the
data recovery more convenient without disconnecting the HDD and HD doctor, and then
connecting the HDD to data compass.

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Selective head image for Toshiba and Fujitsu HDD

Selective head image for Toshiba and Fujitsu HDD is now integrated to Data Compass to make it
more powerful and complete with this technology. It is mostly used to handle single-head
damaged HDD and the 32bit selective head image for Fujitsu is exclusively provided by HD
DOCTOR for Toshiba and Fujitsu.

View sector on the fly during the image

View sector on the fly means users can see the hexadecimal data during the data imaging process.
It is designed to allow users to monitor the process and judge whether the data has value. Before
this, users spent several hours finishing the image task, but finally found that the captured data
are all”4040” or other meaningless data; what a waste of time and human labor! Now with this
function, users can decide whether to carry on the image task.

Figure 15

Learn more about Data Compass 2011 here

SalvationDATA R&D Dept.
http://www.salvationdata.com

SalvationDATA Data Compass 2011 Hardware and Software Combined Solution

www.salvationdata.com Tel: +86 28 68107757 Fax: +86 28 68107757