After a lot of research and testing on Hitachi 2.5” 5410 and 5416 families’ hard drives, SalvationDATA has upgraded successfully its HD Doctor for Hitachi to version 4.4 with new solution to fix the failure of NVRAM repairing of these drives.
This is one big improvement for the NVRAM repair function built in the HD Doctor for Hitachi, especially for the 2.5” Hitachi/IBM recovery of service area adaptive parameters. Recently many of our customers failed to recover 2.5” Hitachi 5416 and 5410 families’ drives due to NVRAM repair failure. The Hitachi Doctor kept working for 10-20 hours but the correct start value in the service area cannot be found as well and the firmware modules therefore cannot be accessed.
Hitachi/IBM hard drives have special design and architecture. Some of important parameters are not saved in ROM chip but are saved in NVRAM chip. NVRAM chip has 8 pins which is different from flash chips. Data in NVRAM can be saved after power off, and also can be accessed at random.
Slow Search is a low speed FW match function that writes modified NVRAM address back to PCB NVRAM, it then reset the power and restarts HDD to access FW modules. When it tries to access modules, it not only accesses RSVD but also other modules, which means it takes longer time. This function has much higher success rate which other tools don’t have.

SalvationDATA users can now use Slow Search function in ver.4.4 for FW match. Because in this new function, the program will not just refer to RSVD module, but also refer to other modules which will get FW match done and finally assisting the NVRAM repair and recover the data.

Download the Hitachi doctor upgrade program, please visit the forum:
http://forum.salvationdata.com or you can email to
info@salvationdata.com for more details.