Thanks Doomer, & Jose this is very interesting, I will look at the Convar website more closely tonight when I have time. This means that there is a discernable difference in the tracks & the surface of disks once they have been written to. Hopefully I can find some more information as this has made me very interested.....

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I think ST is a sub company of Lucas

You guys seen this one?

http://www.ibas.com/about/technology/patan

They are able to, and i Quote, "The platters are then fitted onto the special machine, which scans every single surface and picks up analogue signals from the disk"

Its funny that Ontrack now own Ibas and Vogon, yet Ontrack do not claim to be able to recover platter damaged drives on their website!

ill believe it when i see it with my own eyes

Hello, I see that Nortek was mentioned in this thread so I thought I would join the discussion.

When you've had a scratch of this nature, the magnetized coating is literally stripped from the platter surface. The bit patterns represented in that region have been destroyed and no present or future technology can ever get them back.

Secondary damage occurs when the magnetized particles that used to be attached to the surface fly around the inside of the drive. They can stick to the heads and cause further, less visible damage, and they can also alter the values of bit patterns elsewhere on the drive. This of course irreversibly corrupts that data as well.

If you are lucky and the system region of the drive is not damaged, recovery of the non-scratched areas is a remote possibility. Given that you have taken a picture of the platters, I would assume that you have opened the drive in a non-clean room environment. Naturally, this also severely diminishes the chances of success.

If you are interested in pursuing recovery from this unit, please feel free to email support@nortek.on.ca to open a case.

Regards,

Chris

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Chris Jones
Support Specialist
Nortek Computers Ltd.
phone 705 474 2030 x117
e-mail christopher@nortek.on.ca
website http://www.nortek.on.ca
Toll Free 1-877-474-2058
ISO 9001:2000 Certified

If this is the case what would you use to read from the non-scratched areas on the platter? sounds very theoretical to me