I have a laptop hard drive about 5 or 10 years old that has a double scratch very close to the middle (pic below).
Originally the drive failed and I ran a recovery program and recovered about 2Gb of data before the drive failed completely. After it failed completely, I took the drive apart to look at it and put it back together. I wasn't in a clean room, but was careful taking it apart and put it right back together after taking the picture. After doing some research I purchased 2 or 3 working spare drives to try and have it fixed.
The drive is 40Gb so I assumed someone could replace the read/write head and read everything outside the scratched area (which looks like its 90% of the data)
I have sent the drive to Secure Data Recovery and to Kroll Ontrack. Neither company used the spare drives I provided and Neither company explained why they couldn't get any data off of it. The only explanation I got was in an email and it said: “Media damage on all surface in critical areas; All parts and attempts exhausted.” ...which I don't really understand.

Can someone please explain what that means? Does the first 1/4" of the platter contain file structure info that makes all the other data unreadable?

Thanks

Nill to none I'm sorry to say. Even if you change the heads a dozen times they will continue to die when they hit that damaged spot.

Consider it a hard lesson in data backup.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Just to add to Data-Medics reply. The obvious scratches on the platter are just the tip of the iceberg. If the failed read-write heads have caused this much visible damage, then there is much more damage that cannot be seen with the naked eye. The read-write heads travel 3 billionths of an inch over the platter surface and any damage to the platters (visible or not) will kill the new heads used. Donor parts for a drive need to be very specific including being manufactured within 12 weeks of the patient drive so more than likely the other DR companies would have used their own matching parts, hence yours not being used. Really sorry, but data is toast.

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

Actually i found the video that i originally saw a couple years ago that got me hopeful: www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1OcTKDjO2g
Is it unrealistic to program the head to stay away from the scratch? I know some companies will promise you the world just to get your business.

Ok thanks for the clarification. I appreciate it.

I would try to get data for $600. If I can't get data - you pay only for died donors.

From what I have read here the video is terribly misleading. Most pros here are saying that data cannot be recovered from scratched platters as damage is usually much more than the scratched ring and it will kill all new heads.
I don understand how this guy was able to retrieve data given the fact, that the debris of the platter will circulate in the entire drive and causing spots and scratches outside of the scratched area as well.

Clean platters and do not let heads to go to bad area.

Well,
How to handle 2 or more then two platters

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com