Upon starting the software the application immediately queries your system for any and all physical devices. These devices include installed hard drives, USB drives, thumb drives, and any other physical device that is considered a block storage device. The DVD drives are not queried and therefore eliminated from the search.

During the query of the physical devices there may be some stalling or perhaps the software will seem to ‘hang’. This action can be the result of drives that have gone into a hibernation mode and take a few moments to bring online, or there is a possibility that one of the drives the software is querying has damage to the internals and is causing slow reads. If this is the case then the drive needs to be checked out with a surface scanner before any recovery is started. DTI Data offers a Windows Surface Scanner at no charge to its software purchasers.