Hi, My 320 GB Seagate HDD platter has ring as shown in attached image. Head is also damaged. Kindly let me know if i can recover the data. If yes, how and where? What is the probability? I had opened in a AC Room though not in a clean room.

Looks unrecoverable

_________________
SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Is cloning possible in this case to recover atleast the good sector data?

Impossible.
Murdered area SA.
Without SA impossible to find tracks of data.
Even if a miracle happens, SA is read
The rest of the area will be scratched, there are millions of errors.
Not will be whole files

platter is very bad

_________________
http://www.hpwlab.com

You could go to this company who claims that they can usually recover near 100% of the data from ALL damaged SATA and SAS hard drives. http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option ... e&id=40957

I had a somewhat heated email discussion with someone from CSSI who stood their ground with the statistics. Yet, they now only claim a 92% audited success rate when I look at their data recovery page.

If you want to waste money on shipping, you can always send the drive to them and see if they are as good as they claim.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

No chances.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Thanks for all the inputs and suggestions. I hereby conclude that data recovery from this platter is near to impossible.

Your platter seems bad. Very difficult to recover data. I suggest you to please take professional help.

You didn't detect the air of finality from the last post?

Hey haque,

thanks
I actually didnt notice.

How does this actually happen? How can the head make contact with the platter with such pressure that it causes such a deep groove?

Is it through physically pressing down on the top cover of the drive? Or something else?

Guessing the head got hit or jammed on the ramp and bent it downward or half the head mont broke leaving it dangling
Think like a child's swing if you cut 1 rope

I can say, because I have been successful in a number of cases, that it could still be possible to recover data from other surfaces (given the fact that they are OK). Sometimes it's long in time and there's the fact that WD zones are usually no bigger than 100-150 MB, so large video files or databases are out of the question. But we don't know how bad are the rest of the surfaces.



The ring is not that deep. Maybe 0.1 or 0.2 mm deep, but that's a visual effect. The platter comprises, roughly, two thin metallic layers and a thick crystal layer. A ring of the top metallic layer is gone, and it seems so deep because what you see is the other metallic layer on the bottom through the thick crystal layer.

Hello, your drive is detected in bios or not?
If yes, you could image the drive and recover the rest of the platter, but you will have many corrupted files. It will be a real pain with your recovery software.

_________________
Data Recovery Pakistan