So I just got off the phone with a tech over at Ace Data Recovery (not to be confused with Ace Labs) regarding handling of cases with visible platter damage. He said that they have techniques to resurface platters and can read 50% or more from the damaged surfaces in most cases, and that they do it without using a glide/burnish machine like Kroll claims to.

Personally I think it's mostly just a lot of hot air to get people to pay their high hourly rates. But, I'm curious if any of you who've worked for the bigger companies are familiar with these "platter resurfacing" techniques that can get them readable.

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

I Haven't worked for any of the big companies but i have a friend that works at Kroll Ontrack here in Munich Germany.

He said they don't use any special resurfacing techniques on hard drives. He went into a bit of detail and explained that platter surfaces differ from model and manufacturer and that if it was possible, the machine would have to be calibrated for every different drive to avoid the data area underneath the platter surface being scraped away. This is due to the thickness of the platters themselves and the protection coat differing in height.

Also he mentioned that first the platters would have to be removed and the drive re assembled by hand as there is no machine that can do this.

I have personally been in their lab once and seen their property software and hardware. I have signed a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) so i can't say much but i can tell you that there is no techniques or data recovery tools that they have that gives them any advantage over us.

Most likely this is hot air to impress the customers or convince them to pay the higher price over smaller DR companies.

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Web: https://www.day1data.de

Hi,
Today i did a case that failed a DR Attempt .The Top Platter Surface Had Flaky surface And i Hope Platters Under Would Also Be Same .Now If We Have a Case Like This It Can Never Solves Multiple Flakes coming Out Of The Platter ,1 Donor Gone to Hell

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

I think they are aggregating.

just today we deliver data of Maxtor 500gb drive opened by customer and a scratch on top side but almost on the outer edge and we got away with this, we approx. image 95% of required partition which was last one in our case.

believe me we even did't swap any heads on it, just de-contaminate it.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

There is a technique to cover damaged platers by special polymer. But it has limitation. If damages has not top surface you need to remove platters from drive, cover surface and put platters back. Many models doesn't like this procedure. And because of that it is very expensive to use this technique.