I am happy to announce that Ji2 will be hosting our second data recovery seminar! It will begin April 8th and continue until the 10th, and will take place in Cypress California near our offices.

In light of this new announcement I wanted to share my experiences of the previous seminar to give you an idea of what you can expect at our upcoming event.

Day 1: I headed over to the seminar location in the morning ~8:30am, and arrived to catered breakfast in the main hall. Dmitry began at ~9:00am and spoke until 12 noon at which point there was a 1 hour break for lunch. The following days would play out very similar, but with much more hands on activities.

The speaking schedule (roughly)

9:00am – 12:00pm (Hard drive anatomy) Covered the basic components in a HDD, firmware modules, start-up operation, RAIDs.

1:00pm - 5:00pm (Diagnostics) Covered: “The nature of the clicking noise”, Data recovery flow, PCB anatomy and repair, clean-room (what you need to build one), ATA passwords, Firmware corruption, Imaging. To name a few of the subjects covered.

Day 2: This would begin delving into more advanced data recovery procedures, and also give every attendee the opportunity to open up two hard drives and attempt clean room procedures, as well as soldering.

9:00am – 5:00pm (Advanced Diagnostics and Data recovery procedures) Physical procedures, Head and preamp diagnosis and replacement, screw ups (fingerprints, etc) this included hands on lessons with removing and replacing headstacks, and screw ups.

Day 3 – This would be the final day of the seminar, and would cover platter transplants, and also some chances to get 1 on 1 QA with Dmitry Postrigan himself.

9:00am – 12:00pm (Platter replacement) Hands on lessons with platter transplants

1:00pm – 2:30pm (2 options) Option 1: Guidance software: Bit-locker drive encryption or Option 2: 1 on 1 QA with Dmitry Postrigan

2:30pm – 3:00pm (Atola insight QA)

3:00pm – 4:45pm (Data recovery QA)

4:45pm – 5:00pm (Closing discussion)

That is a general breakdown of how our first seminar flowed. We anticipate that our next seminar will be even more refined and provide an even broader wealth of knowledge and hands-on experience. It goes without saying that after attending these seminars you walk away nearly exhausted from the amount of knowledge that you have gained in only a matter of days. These seminars are intended to give you the knowledge you need to get you started on your way to becoming a Data recovery professional, or to start up your own Data recovery firm.

Hope to see you in April!

-HDD Doctor