Hi all,

First time here (and first time doing hard drive repair, I'm trying to repair a portable hard drive for a friend who dropped it, I opened it up and found the heads stuck so the disks wouldn't spin. When I returned the heads to the default position, it looked like it worked fine, but my computer still couldn't read it. Any advice?

P.S. I'm only interested in retrieving the data, not looking to make it usable in the long term, so I didn't care about dust or anything (but still trying to keep it clean)

https://youtu.be/JcGAdloawpw

According to scuttlebutt across The 'Net, if you opened the hard-drive in a non-ultra-clean room, data recovery may be all but impossible. However, check with others here, maybe a data recovery company specialist will have an idea.

_________________
"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin revisited

If the dust didn't mess it up, running it without the top spindle screw in place definitely did ruin it. w/o that top screw holding the axle steady the vibration killed the heads and probably caused microscopic scratching all across all the platter surfaces. I'd say it's a 90% chance to be a waste of time and money now.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Best advice here would to those, who might be reading this topic in the future - to not repeat any of the steps above.

We work with cases like this, but such recoveries aren't cheap.

_________________
• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

if you open drive then say good bye to your drive and data

_________________
Mohammad Mazaheri

Email: mazaheri.online@gmail.com

Mobile: +989185005214