Hi.
One friend of mine just phoned me. He had a damaged external usb HDD. The drive did not work, some click sound. I guess it may be a electrical problem.
The problem is that he opened the case until he found the plates and heads.
I have said him to close it immediately and not to switch it on.
But now the question is: is the data recoverable? if so, I guess it is not a question of DIY because you will need a clean chamber.... so he will need to send it to a lab and tell them what has happened, right?

regards

your quite correct - drive should not have been opened. Hopefully he/she did not poke at anything but it will need to go to a pro service and hopefully no damage has been done to the drive by opening.... I blame too many silly self help videos on youtube

it will be extremely lucky to rescue any data considering the drive has been opened in a dirty environment...

Most likely the data can still be recovered (assuming it wasn't powered on with mangled read/write heads leading to scratched platters).

We've recovered quite a few drives that were previously opened, even ones with fingerprints on the top platter. We just charge a non-refundable up-front cleaning charge to do a thorough cleaning inside of a clean chamber to get it back to a safe condition. Then we have to address the original problem, which in the case of a clicking external hard drive is probably a 99.9% chance of being failed read/write heads.

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