Well,
Platters can be taken out all together and even one by one without loosing platter alignment and also inspection can be done .A custom tool can separate platters ,help you in visual inspection and reassemble them back so they work ,but the story changes when it has passed via a lab with lousy techs i recently got a seagate case were top platter was scratched when top head was not ever present in headstack lol

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Did you manage to image it and recover successfully bro? What is the process that happens after the imaging process in detail? thanks!

after a successful imaging, is there a chance that the data is unreadable due to system area damage? Are there any algorithms or software that can decipher it?

without system area access it is not possible to read a single sector from the drive, so it is the very first step to gain access to important SA objects.

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Encryption on the desktop internal HDD is enough rare situation (if we are not talking about malware). If your drive has been imaged successfully, so what is the problem to get access the data?

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Do you mean that even after imaging 100%, without SA, you are still unable to access data? How do you gain access then? Thanks bro

This this way, SA or System Area is the "firmware" that is written on platters. If the drive doesn't read this data from the platters to the drive RAM the the drive will not work at all and you can't image/clone it.

Your data is inside the "user area" from LBA 0 till the end. You can't access to LBA at all unless SA is working at least at a level that allow user space area access.

If someone is "imaging" or "cloning" the drive then SA did work already to the point of initializing the drive to allow LBA space access.

If you image 100% of the drive then you do have working SA.

There are some "exceptions" like damaged defect lists and translator that can cause "shifts" or stuff like that but for now let's assume that the platter scratch is outside the SA space and it's located on the user area.

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This is a ST2000DM001 drive, so native F3 arch Seagate.

Recovery firm claims that they did image the drive 100% (minus the scratch portion) but they need some sort of algorithm to find a way to read the data as the files are truncated ...

Does this sounds reasonable ?

This is not like a drive that was hot swaped with incorrect defect lists/translator.

I would expect that for this sort of drive if you have the wrong translator you wouldn't be able to access any sector at all, like on 7200.12 with partial access only and hot swap shouldn't be possible on those to start with so .... how the hell did the recovery firm end up with truncated data ?

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perhaps they used RAW rec, which is crap on Ext fs unless written smart. Just an idea how it can be truncated...
btw, it is not appropriate to say the drive imaged 100% when it's not. If they cloned 95% but the FS metadata is in the remaining 5% it can bring up some problems.

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Agree !!!

This must be a file system/logic problem.

I can't see any way for them to read LBA on a Seagate F3 without proper SA initialization. An hot swap would be completly out of the question so no translator shifts due to wrong translator/defect lists ....

Unless they really mess something up but if the scratch were to be on SA the drive wouldn't initialize at all .... So the scratch have to be outside the SA so the problem must be logic ...

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hotswap is not out of question, but probably not the case here.

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I don't think a "regular" DR firm would hot swap a Seagate F3 because donor wouldn't initialize properly with patient media/heads adaptives and if they were to hot swap with non-native ROM then live pcb wouldn't read patient drive.

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i just meant it can be done. But i don't think the actual recovery has gone this far.

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Well,
For These DM series i have given up .Mostly they end with bad platter surface and scored media .As fas as hot swap is concerned ,We can take a donor after we initialise it using translator etc from other patient .Then make it standby swap donor heads to patient and voila .But who goes this farrrrrrrr offffffff

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what are some of the software available out there to translate the data? Will it be successful?

This doesn't make much sense ...

Maybe trying another data recovery firm ?

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really sorry to bring my thread up again as I have been banned previously for asking regarding this issue. I am not a tech person and just want my data back. I am confused at what is happening and am trying to seek help here from you seniors.

The DR firm managed to image my drive but the result is in raw data form and is not readable as the files are all messed up. They said they are unable to read the data properly. Is there any recommendations anyone can make? Thank you once again for any advice.

Eh, it seems i was on the spot then with the RAW recovery idea....

I think there is no more recommendations we can give unless sending the bad drive and the image for further investigation.

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Dear Pepe, do you mean your reply on 9th May? This one

perhaps they used RAW rec, which is crap on Ext fs unless written smart. Just an idea how it can be truncated...
btw, it is not appropriate to say the drive imaged 100% when it's not. If they cloned 95% but the FS metadata is in the remaining 5% it can bring up some problems.

yes, i meant that but as you told me it wasn't Ext but NTFS, it puts things in a different perspective.

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