There are several software tools available that claim they can “repair” bad sectors on a hard drive. Many people are misled into thinking these utilities are actually fixing the hard drive. To an extent, they are, but in reality what is occurring is something modern hard drives actually do anyways automatically, without the use of specialized software tools. Hard drives have internally programmed maintenance routines that they constantly perform, even while you’re utilizing the hard drive. These programs claiming to “repair” the drive just give the drive an extra “push” to start this automatic, drive-level repair process.

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Now that we have talked about all of the parts that are easy to identify and to see, it is now time to zoom in and take a closer look at the head stack itself. You will find many of the most interesting aspects of the head stack are found at the end of the arm, where the head itself is located.

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In this day and age nearly everyone knows a little something about computing, whether it is how to download new songs to your iPod or how to download illegal content from your favorite torrent site. The population is generally more technically savvy then we were even three or four years ago. When the average person hears “Hard drive”, most actually know that there are at least two things involved in a hard drive. There are disks and there “needles” or “heads”. Many people think of hard drives as highly advanced record players, and in some aspects they are right. Just like it’s much older grandfather, the hard drive has both a record (platters) and a needle (heads). The platters store data by utilizing magnetization, and the head has the job of both reading these magnetic fields and changing them (what we call writing).

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So now that we’ve already covered the basics and you now you grasp the fundamental concepts of hexadecimal and how it represents data, it’s time to actually apply what you have learned so far toward real world situations. After all, what would be the point of knowing how to read hex if there was no relevant use for it in data recovery and forensics?

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Hexadecimal is a “base 16″ numbering system primarily used as an easy-to-read way to represent binary values

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