It looks something like this:
http://joao.idomyweb.com/images/head_crash.jpg

It's the VERY inner few millimeters of the bottom platter, it's just see-through now!
The drive just clicks now as it tries to seek it's own missing data.
Is there any software or any way to have the drive scan JUST the raw data from the rest of the drive?

History:
The hard drive was having detection issues in windows,
Then stopped booting,
then scandisk would freeze on it,
eventually seatools found tons of bad sectors,
and spinrite locked out enough of them to boot the drive.

When doing a raw data recover in windows, I came back an hour later to: "Click, click, click, click"

I opened the drive up in a mini-clean room we have at my temp job (I'm a laptop specialist) to find the magnetic layer stripped

spinrite

drive killer

_________________
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http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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Interesting. More info?

There's little to know at the moment....

Yup, I have seen a few with polished platters from being "Spun Right".

Lucky I could still recover the data for them.

Into a little glass jar.