Step Two: Recovering Failed Medium

This step is one of the most critical steps, but it is not always necessary. It is only necessary when one of the disks in the array has failed and can no longer be cloned. In this case we must open the drive in a clean-room to diagnose the problem. Often times SCSI drives contain failed heads. In this case, the heads must be removed from the drive. We then use specialized equipment to read the data from each platter side, creating a raw image of each platter side. Once all of the platter sides have been cloned, we combine all of the files into one large file, which is the entire disk image of the original drive. We then must remove sectors that were originally marked as "bad" when the hard drive was manufactured, otherwise the disk image would contain sectors throughout that do not belong, creating a "slippage" condition. After a good disk image has been created and verified, then we move to the next step: Step Three: Analyzing the Clone Images

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