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Atola insight: Archives

Atola Insight: Supported hard drives

We receive this question again and again: what hard drives (model numbers) are supported by Atola Insight? I completely realize the importance of this question, but unfortunately, there is no simple answer. When we were designing Atola Insight, we’ve faced a dilemma: whether we add support for new hard drives on a per-model basis or use a different approach. We have chosen a different approach, and I will try to explain what it is. Per-model basis means that we start working on new hard drive models as soon as we have them in our lab, which means that there is always 3-12 months delay before the software can work with Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Atola insight: Archives

Update on Atola Insight

We had a fully working Atola Insight software together with Atola DiskSense unit on the show, so anyone could see it in action and even try it. I am very proud that we had no program crashes and no hardware failures during the expo, thanks to Fedir, Andrey and Alexander — our top-notch developers. It was pleasure to meet our potential customers on the show and at the seminar and I’d like to thank everyone who attended. I’ve learned a lot while listening to the feedback, and we have already made changes to our current road map according to the feedback. Last couple of weeks my email was literally flooded Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Atola insight: Archives

Answering questions about Atola Insight

It’s been two days since we announced Atola Insight, and we are already virtually flooded with questions and feedback about it. I will now go through the most common questions: Pricing: It will be a stand-alone product with a set price; no per-use charge as seen in Repair Station/HDD Unlock Wizard. Sorry, no prices are set so far. Preliminary pricing information can be expected in February 2008. Full roadmap (2-year development plan) will be released in March 2008. Presentation at CES 2008: I will do my best to have it taped. If that doesn’t happen for any reason, then I will at least publish my powerpoint presentation (EDIT: see comments Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Atola insight: Archives

Firmware recovery with Atola Insight

I am happy to provide everyone with the a new screenshot that we’ve got today: Accessing firmware files (system area modules): Manual firmware recovery: downloading firmware This is an old-fashion way of accessing firmware files (modules): you can perform the recovery yourself. But wait, Atola Insight can do much more than that. It can automatically repair most kinds of firmware damage for you; all you have to do is to click a single button. Automatic firmware recovery in progress In automatic mode, the program first creates full firmware backup, diagnoses the problem, and then takes all necessary steps to recover the drive. Automatic mode saves tremendous amount of time since Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Atola insight: Archives

Atola Insight at CES 2008

If you want to see Atola Insight in action, then you are welcome to visit us at CES 2008. Project presentation at CES 2008 (January 7-10) in Las Vegas Floor plan of the show | booth number: 73539 (Look for YEC booth and ask for Dmitry Postrigan) in the Sands Convention Center. By the way, YEC also presents Shinobi, an HDD Unlocking tool powered by Atola Unlocker module. They also have all kinds of HDD duplicators. You have an opportunity to see all hi-tech HDD tools in one place, so do not miss the chance!

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Atola insight: Archives

Real time current monitor in Atola Insight

We’ve got it working today. There will be two kinds of current monitors in Atola Insight: full-sized monitor and tiny monitor. Tiny monitor can stay on the screen allowing to always keep an eye on hard drive’s power consumption. Current Monitor (click to see in full size) The image above shows normal spin-up and initialization currents (5V and 12V) for a desktop hard drive.

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Atola insight: Archives

We’ve got an Insight

It’s been quiet in our blog last months, and for a good reason. We are currently developing Atola Insight, a data recovery solution. What’s good about it is that it covers all four phases of a data recovery process: diagnostics, firmware recovery, duplication/imaging, and file recovery. The Fourth Element Every data recovery specialist knows about the firmware recovery tools, disk duplication (or imaging) tools, and file recovery (data extraction) tools. But there is one more important thing that often gets overlooked: diagnostics. When a hard drive arrives to the lab, the very first thing a specialist has to do is to find out the current state of the hard drive. Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Hard drives

Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity

[Update 2022] These days Atola Technology makes digital forensic tools that allow restoring HDD capacity, among other more complex and effective capabilities: Atola Insight Forensic Atola TaskForce   This article is a complete guide on recovering your hard drive’s factory capacity. At the end of this article there is a link to our program that recovers factory capacity of any hard drive. “My hard drive has mysteriously became smaller! How can I restore its full capacity?” There are several common reasons of why your hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes: Your Operating System does not support LBA48 addressing mode You are mixing binary and decimal gigabytes Your Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Data recovery

Smart partition recovery software

In most partition recovery software, to locate all partitions on a damaged hard drive, you have to scan the entire surface. The process, which is often pretty much useless, may take up to several hours of your precious time, and it may even take days if the hard drive is filled with bad blocks. In the worst case scenario, it can make significant damage to the hard drive, thus making the data recovery process much more complicated and expensive. While the need of scanning the entire hard drive might look reasonable, in vast majority of cases it is not needed. Furthermore, there’s no need to scan more than 1% of Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Data recovery

Partition Find and Mount v.2.2 released

Revolution in Partition Recovery software is coming! ;-) Today we have released a new version of Partition Find and Mount with many valuable improvements. If you are not familiar with Partition Find and Mount yet – it’s all about finding partitions when the MBR and/or Boot Sector are destroyed. In this release we were primarily focused on dealing with damaged volumes and the speed and quality of partition searching process. Reading a hard drive sector by sector takes a lot of time nowadays, so we are trying to read as little data as possible while not missing anything important. We have developed a number of techniques that allow us to Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago