Have a Seagate drive where, upon power, the heads travel the full distance of the platters 11 times and then the drive shuts off.
The head park area is covered with a considerable amount of black metal shavings.
And, the recirculation filter is black although I did not see shavings anywhere else.
I've opened quite a few drives and have never found one like this.
A Google search also kinda makes me think it is somewhat rare.
Has anyone experienced this and have some suggestions for where the metal dust might be coming from and/or suggestions how I might proceed to recover data?

The picture shows just some of the shavings. I took the picture after a light spray of compressed air.

Thank you,

It's a Seagate so it's not rare at all. Most members of this forum see that type of damage everyday. Its where at least one of the read-write heads has come into contact with the platter surface and has scraped off the magnetic coating. The black dust is actually your client data. When this happens the shavings get trapped under the other heads and the damage gets compounded. You would need to fully inspect each platter surface before proceeding any further, but chances of recovery are about 0.1%

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

Thank you very much.

+1 to what ddrecovery says.

Actually, with this amount of magnetic dust, I'd say chances are 0.0%, but....

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http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

let me argue with that...

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

No one 's holding you from arguing.
We have not seen the platters, but by the amount of dust and the tendency of these drives to create huge MD zones, I can predict this is a waste of time.
You can try and share your results, I'm sure you will make the best possible outcome.

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http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners