Over the many years of DR I have often recieved HDDs with severe platter damage, which a previous DR company had successfully recovered the data, and quoted at a very high price. As far as I am aware, and in my personal experience, some levels of damage are still recoverable depending on how damaged, where the damage is, and recovery method following physical work, i.e cloning. But I do believe these disks were damaged malicously, but is very difficult to point the finger at DR companies on an individual job basis.

My question is at what level of platter damage can data still be recovered?

I think it's a very complicated answer.
I've had drives with platter damage very small, hard to see, that damaged the heads as soon as the drive started.
Now I'm imaging (slowly) a SAS drive with severe platter damage (in 3 areas), but the drive got ready and running until now.
That's why I think it's very difficult to get an answer on that, I've seen all kind of cases.

the worst case its when the heads damaged the magnetic coating layer, that happend some times on Seagate, and some Samsung Cases, if u got damaged on the SA zone, u dont have choice for example seagate 2.5 Mac, the most cases on wich we can get a hope to tried to get data its when the the head crash was on the land zone happends some times at some models too like Maxtor ,Samsung,Hitachi, Seagate, and only until now we check only one case on WD 3.5"

Regards

I have recovered a badly platter damaged Samsung Spinpoint before, yet couldnt recover a maxtor with a small scratch, so I know every case is different. I just cant understand how some companies claim to get '95% of all data' from a disk where the top platter has 4 or 5 seperate scores that are easily 1mm deep! I remember some hype about blue laser technology capable of reading directly from platter surface but unless I am missing something I am not aware that anything ever came from it!

I do enjoy a challenge though, but I think there is a big difference between challenging and impossible!

lasers just dont have enough resolution with the current recording density to be able to read anything (if possible) from the platters.

Dobre

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I think some companies intentionally damage HDDs after they get a recovery from it. It's a dirty way to do business so hopefully they won't last for long.

Ive recovered from a Samsung with platter damage, but ive never been able to recover from 3.5" Hitachi`s. Has anyone else had any luck with Hitachi`s?

I sent my 750GB WD for data recovery(not showing up on computer and a constant loud noise) to a company and after a long time they said it has severe platter damage and the data map is gone, no data recovered. does any one have any possible suggestion, the data was very essential

I know that this is an old thread, but seeing that it has popped back up, I feel I must comment. There are times when a drive is severely damaged that companies will quote very high, knowing that the client will just turn it down. By doing this, they count it as turned down and not unrecoverable, keeping their failure rate down.

But, there are also the times when we get the drive 98% mirrored before we quote and the drive finally gives up the ghost. We have all the data when we quote, but there is little chance that anyone else will ever get anything from that drive. The difference here is that we will let the client know what happened so that they can make an informed decision...accept our quote or consider the data lost forever. That doesn't happen very often, once every couple of years, but it does happen from time to time.

To answer arezoo80, it certainly wouldn't hurt to get a second opinion, but the odds are, your drive is toast.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Get a second opinion... likely for an attempt fee at a minimum.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

To add to my first comment. I had a drive that came in that had two holes in it from a drill press. I quoted high, knowing that the data was very important (forensics case), but with little expectation that anything would ever be extracted from the drive. The client accepted, to my surprise. But, on top of that, my tech was able to get the drive 68% mirrored before it finally died for good.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

One other comment...

What I also found quite disappointing over time is that despite dealing with the challenge of recovering data from drive with platter damage of whatever degree, then one also has to deal with the challenge of making a customer understand the circumstances, possible outcome, the final outcome if successful and how successful, and to top it off have to deal with the "baby" habit of "Why this? Why that? Why? Why? I do not think it is worth that much money, bla bla bla.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

thank you very much Luke and labtech for responding, any suggestion for a second opinion is appreciated, I just don't want a place that asks for hundreds and then says pay it even if nothing recovered, thanks again

Do ample research. The first recovery took a long time, so I guess time is not the most important issue.

Google, call, make comparisons of what has one to offer while others do not. You will see...

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

There are reputable members from USA in this forum, I suggest you contact member jono-ats he's in Atlanta.
As far as I know, he doesn't charge for evaluation.

Regarding other posts above, I too can confirm that we had several cases similar to the one Luke describes, where drive died a little before imaging completed (or at worst scenario, in the middle of imaging). In the first case we got the data and informed client that they got lucky.

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