Dealing with clicking hard drives on a daily basis, we are all too familiar with what we will find when we inspect them. We thought you might like to see what can happen to the interior of your hard drive when it is dropped?
Data recovery from a drive with damaged heads
When you are saving or accessing data from your hard drive, the read write heads do just that - they read from and write to, the platter surfaces where your data is stored. If you ever drop your hard disk drive, then this picture shows the typical damage to the read write heads that can be caused.
As you can see from the picture, ALL of the heads have become completely dislodged and are away from what is known as the ‘slider’, or the part of arm assembly that holds the actual head in place.
How do you recover data from a damaged hard drive?
Whilst it is much harder to recover data from physically damaged hard drives, with the right facilities, tooling and expertise it is possible! This particular hard drive will now require clean room works to replace the damaged headstack assembly. We do this by removing the broken headstack completely and once the hard drive has been thoroughly and carefully cleaned of any remaining debris, checked thoroughly for damage, we can replace it with a compatible donor headstack from our hard disk drive donor parts library in an attempt to recover the data.
Not all drives will suffer damage to this extent when dropped, and this is probably as bad as it can get in terms of actual head damage. It is unlikely you will be able to recover data using a software programme in this situation so if the data is important to you, seeking an expert in data recovery is your best option.
Fortunately, in this particular case, the client realised that the damage was severe, and sought immediate professional intervention, and whilst not all of the data was completely recoverable, we managed to get back all that was of irreplaceable value.
If you have dropped your hard drive and are unsure of your options, EADR are happy to inspect your device and provide a no obligation diagnosis for you. Call the team today on 01953 667977.