Data recovery hardware

Data recovery hardware was developed because data recovery software lacks the ability to deal with all lost or corrupted data files. Often the failures, such as media files with bad sectors, firmware failures, PCB (Printed circuit board) failures, hard drive head failures, etc., cannot be fixed.

Bad sectors

The two types of bad sectors are "physical" and "logical" bad sectors, or "hard" and "soft" bad sectors.^[1]

When a disk has physical bad sectors, software cannot effectively offer soft reset, hard reset, power reset, error handling, read algorithm auto exchange nor skip sectors. If a disk with bad physical sectors is connected to a PC, the condition would potentially not be detected.

Soft bad sectors can potentially be fixed by either data recovery software or hardware, depending on the damaged condition. Some amount of bad sectors can be skipped using software, while a severely corrupted disk with a large area of bad sectors may potentially only be repaired.^[2] Bad sectors are areas on the hard drive that cannot be read. Even new hardrives sometimes contain bad sectors. Since manufacturers intensely compete to cram more space into disks, systems operate close to the limit of that generation of technology.^[3]

Dead PCB

When the drive has dead PCB (Printed circuit board), users need to:

swap in a new PCB
put one donor chip and write by chip reader with matching ROM (Read-only memory) content
get the dead drive spinning

When the drive has physical head damage, users need to open the drive in cleanroom environment and find donor heads or other donor components to swap.