Automatic Diagnostics

Automatic Checkup feature diagnoses the following hard drive components:

• Electronics (circuit board)
• Motor
• Heads
• Media surface
• Firmware area
• Partitions and file systems

One-button start of Diagnostics

First, hard drive's electronics (printed circuit board or PCB) is diagnosed. The system applies power to the device and records and analyzes spin-up current curve. This allows to detect most issues with the PCB and the motor.

Then, the contents of the hard drive's ATA registers and device identification sector are being analyzed.

Measuring hard drive's currents

After that, the head stack is tested. Several factors are taken into consideration when diagnosing heads:

• media access time for each head,
• power consumption curves,
• and internal hard drive's error reporting systems.

Head stack test

If head stack looks good, the system performs a short media scan. The purpose of this scan is to find out how many "bad sectors" (if any) there are on the surface:

Checking media surface for bad sectors

Then, several firmware tests are performed:

Firmware checks

If no issues found up to this point, a file systems checkup is performed:

Short analysis of filesystems

After all tests are done, Atola Insight Forensic will display the full report. The Diagnostics result message box contains a short summary of all tests:

Final diagnosis