NO, IT WON'T Work for years !
Do NOT open that drive outside the clean room even if the platter is scrapped. It will just add more problems to the already damaged drive !
Ask the data recovery firm that handled the case to provide more details about the scratch and if possible some pictures of it, but at this point the best course of action it will be to get the needed software by other means...

For the record i have a VERY OLD Fujitsu MPG_AT E from 2001. Those drives have very low capacity. The drive in question have some damage (a lateral small cut) on the side sticker on the right side of the drive so the inside of the drive was exposed to dust for a while (some hours).

Scan the drive with Victoria. Drive is one platter and one head only and the exposition to air/dust was "acidental" on the region of Portugal - Lisbon for about some hours only.

Result of the scan is a almost all the surface can be read without any issue untill 96% of LBA and then you get lots of errors and bad sectors. This is because the lateral opening is near the outer eadge of the platter and the LBAs at the end are at the outside edge (drive writes on platter from center to end).

If this happens on a very small capacity drive now do the same on a drive with more capacity and figure out what is going to happen

Not only heads are way more easy to kill but also each particle of dust will afect more data as there will be more data on the same size of platter.

Of course that it might depend on country and conditions of the region where you live. If you live in industrial place with lot of smoke, or near the sea with lots of humidity or near some dusty place, etc ...

dust itself does not kill the data. If u run it dirty some damage can occur easily. If the platters are damaged, there is a good chance they need to be cleaned before any recovery attempt anyway, so taking a pic would not really affect the chances of recovery. IMO
(I am not talking about leaving it open for hours and powering it up of course)

I got that equipment in broken state - so backup was no option even thou the scratches on platters i caused myself.

Dear Sirs,

Only came here for a recommendations of a good data recovery service that can recover from scratched platters.

The hdd: Hitachi travelstar IC25N020ATMR04-0 P/N:08K0632.
Heads got smashed and when powered on it scratched the platters.
It came here back from local HDD recovery service with note that it's severely scratched and they won't recover anything.

If anyone is interested, I can open it up and take a photo.

Unfortunately, the HDD is from expensive tooling equipment and manufacturer refused to support this older equipment - and I left with a dead machine.

From whole 40GB HDD I need only 1MB binary file I understand that it can possibly be in the scratched region, but I'm willing to risk it if there is a chance to read out more then 10%.

Also any approximate price estimate of this service would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Petr