Automatic Diagnostics

Automatic Checkup feature diagnoses the following hard drive components:

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

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:

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:

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:

Then, several firmware tests are performed:

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

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