I've been reading a lot lately about the way hard drives are built. One thing that sticks out to me in the alignment of the platters is so precise and you might as well be hit by lightning before you git right.

My question to the people here can you still get bits off the drive. What I mean is regardless of the lack of alignment and knowing that the data will not be in any readable format, can you still read the 1s and 0s off the drive.

If yes, given sufficient time and some knowledge of the file system used it may be possible to determine the bad alignment and re-build the data onto a good drive.

Right now it's just a thought and I'm not sure if it is at all possible. As well, given the large capacity of drives it may take forever to get it working. I'm know that there are literally billions of combinations.

Thanks.

If you know how drives work, you have the answer.

P.S. the key question is "how much is data valued". If there is no problem about it and there is no timing problem, there is almost little or no problem at all about getting data