The FBI will soon complete its analysis of data from a flight simulator taken from the home of the pilot of a missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the US agency's director said Wednesday.

Malaysian officials had asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help recover files deleted from the simulator's hard drive.

FBI chief James Comey told lawmakers that experts were working "literally round the clock" to finish their analysis, in the hopes that the data could provide clues as to what happened to Flight 370, which vanished March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Malaysia "took us up on our technical abilities, which involves the exploitation of certain computer forensic materials that they've given to us. That work is ongoing," Comey told a House subcommittee meeting to discuss the FBI's 2015 budget request.

"I don't want to say more about that in an open setting, but I expect it to be done fairly shortly, within a day or two."

Malaysian police removed the simulator from Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's home nearly two weeks ago, after investigators said they believed the Boeing 777 had been deliberately diverted from its intended route by someone on board.

Malaysia on Monday announced that evidence showed the jet crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

A multinational search for the wreckage continued Wednesday, energized by recent satellite images showing more than 100 floating objects in the remote waters.

Comey did not indicate whether the results of the analysis would be made public.