What happens if you have a hard disk which spins erratically, or the heads are making clicking noises, or maybe everything seems fine but the disk is just not recognized by the PC or any other tool? Since you don't have access to the disk you may conclude that it is due to the controller board failure or some mechanical or physical damage, and whatever you try to do to fix the drive is then driven simply by your intuition because you have no information about the status of a drive that is simply not recognized by your utilities.
But help is at hand, because the PC3000 is a unique tool that can communicate with the drive in such situations by using vendor specific commands to switch the drive into kernel mode - the one that is used by the manufacturer to provide read/write access to the firmware on the controller board and firmware modules, such as Microcode Overlays, HDD Configuration Tables, Defects Tables, SMART Attributes, Security Subsystem, Adaptives, etc., stored at the disk service area (maintenance track) at negative cylinders. When the drive is not recognized by the PC, it basically means that the HDD cannot boot up properly due to electrical failure, mechanical/physical damage or corruption of the firmware modules on the controller or the disk service area (maintenance track). By using PC3000 you can diagnose the drive and determine exactly what is causing the failure. Furthermore, in our experience more than 50% of such failures (and for some particular HDD models over 90%) are due to firmware related problems that can be resolved using PC3000. You can simply reload firmware modules onto the damaged drive or just use one of the PC3000 built-in fixes available for the most common failures of the particular HDD model, such as Fujitsu MPG's firmware damage, Maxtor's G-List/P-List corruption (e.g. 'Maxtor N40P' and 'Maxtor Athena' family), Western Digital's S.M.A.R.T. counters overflow and others.
PC3000 supports 3.5" ATA/SATA Hard Disk Drives from the following manufacturers :- Maxtor/Quantum, Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, IBM/Hitachi, Samsung, Conner, HP, Kalok, Teac, Daeyoung, and Xebec.