There are two types of causes for data loss: failures of hard drive hardware and logical errors in data stored on the hard drive. The first, which manifests as physical errors within the hardware, makes accessing the data stored on the hard drive very difficult or even impossible when using conventional system disk ports. In this case, a special hardware has to be used to gain access to the data on the drive and extract it.

The logical errors on the disk may be incorrect system information, corrupted or damaged system files, overwritten files, lost cluster chains, etc. In this case, special data recovery software has to be used to retrieve the data.

In most cases, disk physical errors cause logical errors, too. This requires a combination of special data recovery hardware for physical access to the drive alongside data recovery software for logical recovery from faulty hard drives.

Nearly all data recovery hardware is bundled with logical data recovery software, and that software usually delivers impressive results. Therefore, it may be reasonable to try another data recovery program if the bundled software has not worked satisfactorily. Different software manufacturers utilize different approaches for data recovery and good programs might perform quite differently in the same case.

It's even better if this alternative program can work directly with such data recovery hardware. In this case, the hardware can extract data from the faulty hard drive and send it directly to the software – thus avoiding some intermediate steps like disk imaging. A good example of this can be seen with DeepSpar Disk Imager™ (DDI) from DeepSpar and R-Studio, whereas R-Studio can directly access data on a hard drive connected to the DDI hardware. Read more about this collaboration in R-Studio's online help page DeepSpar Disk Imager™.

There's other data recovery hardware, too, like the PC-3000 family of professional data recovery tools from ACELab. It's highly esteemed in the data recovery community and widely used for recovering data from hard drives that have experienced severe physical failures. It comes bundled with a decent data recovery program, Data Extractor, but as we mentioned above, it's a good idea to have another program that can also work with the PC-3000 hardware.

R-Studio might be a great candidate as an alternative program. It's also highly esteemed among data recovery professionals and boasts all the capabilities necessary to solve many complex data recovery tasks. That's why we decided to test the duo of R-Studio and one of the most popular PC-3000 hardware boards, the PC-3000 UDMA.

Usually, data recovery from unhealthy hard drives starts with imaging. This is necessary to ensure data safety and avoid accidental corruption of the original data on the disk, but it's a very lengthy process. This is especially true when the drive is malfunctioning.

In this case, the hard drive may fail during this process when its hardware state is very poor. Moreover, some faulty hard drives sometimes stop responding in a relatively short amount of time. They generally resume their normal operation after some time, but such interruptions make hard drive imaging very difficult and, in some cases, impossible. As a result, it's more expedient to recover data directly from the disk when recovering only small volumes of data.

In our analysis, we'll connect a test hard drive to the PC-3000 UDMA board and try to use R-Studio to gain access to the files on that drive.

We need to complete the following steps for that:

1. Connect the hard drive to the PC-3000 UDMA board. Start the computer, run the PC 3000 Win XXX Disk utility from the PC 3000 software, and make sure that the PC 3000 UDMA board works with the hard drive.

A hard drive connected to the system through the PC-3000 UDMA board
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Refer to the PC-3000 UDMA board documentation for details.

2. Run R-Studio and locate the disk from the PC-3000 on the R-Studio Device panel.

A hard drive connected through the PC-3000 UDMA board in R-Studio
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It should appear as any other conventional hard drive.

3. Perform the necessary data recovery operations. You can work with the hard drive as if it was connected directly to the system. For example, you can scan the drive.

The PC-3000 hard drive being scanned
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R-Studio will show scan results when the scan is over, or when you've interrupted the scan process.

Scan result for the PC-3000 hard drive
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Then, the files and folders can be enumerated on any of the recognized partitions. We chose Recognized2 in our test.

Files and folders found on the PC-3000 hard drive
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Found files and folders may be previewed, recovered, searched for, and processed in other ways, too, just as if they were resided on a hard drive connected directly to the system.

Conclusions
Our test has shown that R-Studio and the PC-3000 UDMA board can successfully work together. Hard drives connected to the board can be processed as if they were drives connected to conventional disk ports. Moreover, hard drives connected through PC-3000 boards can be included into various virtual objects in R-Studio, including virtual RAIDs, LDM/LVM volumes, and alike. These collaborations make it possible for users to leverage specialized data recovery hardware alongside alternative advanced data recovery program and greatly improve the results of their data recovery project.