Damaged Hard Drive Imaging – Atola Taskforce

The Atola Taskforce is the cutting edge technology tool for the evidence that works at the high-speed. It will be able to acquire the media whether they are in excellent or damaged condition. It was developed with the forensic requirement in mind. The TaskForce can be operated by both standalone modes or by multiple users for devices connected to the same LAN and have an upper limit for the number of devices allowed to work.

Dedicated support for the damages drives

For performing Forensic Imaging from the hard drives that come with sustained physical damage and from solid-state drives that becomes a massive problem by nature. The imaging engine of TaskForce will be optimized for the best results. It will ensure that procurement of the most amounts of the data possible through a particular mechanism or methods like the following.

• Data imaging only from the good heads.
• Imaging of drives with the scratched surfaces.
• Drive the diagnostic that will run for a longer time.
• Automated protection against the cases of short-circuiting and over the current.
• Imaging of the drives that will quickly freeze.
• Imaging of the drivers with the firmware issues.
• All SAS / SATA, SATA, IDE ports that have current sensors on them.

Imagining the drive with the damaged head

The diagnostics module, selective head imaging and multi-pass imaging algorithm will allow forensic investigator to handle a drive with the damaged heads gently and effectively. All these techniques will reduce the risk of losing the data on the working part of the head stack.

Start with diagnosis

The built-in diagnostic modules will automatically check the major subsystems of the evidence drives like, media surface, circuit board, heads, firmware, and the file system. The diagnostic reports will offer detailed information about heads clearly. Additionally, it will also provide recommendations for the optimal strategy for the broken hard drive.

Steps to select the head imaging

Step 1: click on the “image” category found on the left side of the menu.

Step 2: Select the source and target device.

Step 3: Click on “continue.”

Here, if the head is identified as damaged during the process of diagnosis. In this stage, you will see the pop-up window prompting you to disable the damaged crown. When you click “yes”, you confirm that the head should be automatically disabled for the subsequent imaging session.

Step 4: Click on the tab “change” to adjust the setting in the imaging session.

Step 5: In the tab “What to image”, click on “All sectors”, the selective imaging.

Step 6: Un-select the damaged head and click on the tab “Save”.

Step 7: It is time to launch the imaging session and click on the “Start” button for the action.

Handling the damaged hard drives

Atola TaskForce works on algorithm-based imaging for Computer forensics and investigations. It is developed using long term data recovery options. Some of the features include,

• Multi-pass imaging with multiple timeouts for every pass
• Reset and power cycle adjustable error actions
• Automated handling or freezing damages drives
• Segmented hashing
• Disable read look-ahead
• Imaging in the reverse direction
• Block size management
• Simultaneous has calculations