When doing a data recovery on a hard drive it is extremely valuable to perform some basic tests on the drive to determine the best way tp progress with the recovery.  The Phyiscal Media tests do this by reading different areas of the disk to try and detect if there are likely to be a significant number of failed sectors.  The tests are reading from the start of the disk, the end of the disk, and then random areas of the disk.

On a good disk, the result will be shown as below which indicates that no errors where detected, and reading was fast.

On a problem disk, there will be inidcations of failed sectors, or sectors that were slow to read.  There should never be indications of slow reading on first and final sectors, but occasionally disks will indicate a slowness on random sectors.  This is acceptable.  Each test will time out after a minute, and if it does time out, this indicates that there is a physical issue with the disk.

Depending on the results, a choice can be made to image the disk first, or try a straight recovery of the data.

Continue to Wizard

This is the standard option if the physical test looks OK.  If there are no more than one or two errors, and the reading is reasonably fast, then the proceeding to the wizard is the best approach. If there are too many errors detected, this option will be disabled.

On may formats, the next stage will be a quick evaluation of the disk structure.

Image Disk

If the disk is very slow to read, or has many errors the  the best procedure to follow while recovering a disk is to create a disk image. By clicking on this button, the program will go directly to the disk image function.

Cancel

This will return to the Wizard entry screen