Hard Drive Lab
The physical recovery presupposes repairing the compromised components or replacing them with the donor parts from the identical media. These procedures are specifically designed to perform a recovery without any further damage to the original media. Thus, if a recovery involves disassembling the hard drive to its core components, this task must only be performed in a specialized clean room facility.
Head Crash Failure
Normally operating HDD heads are supported at their proper flying height by trivial aerodynamic force while the disk rotates. Due to the extremely close spacing between the heads and the disk surface, hard disk drives are vulnerable to being damaged by a head crash. The worst scenario of this failure happens when head starts scraping across the platter surface. When it is too late, your data will be grinding away together with the thin magnetic film covering the surface of the disk. To stop inevitable data loss the drive must be stopped immediately after first signs of head crash to prevent further damage. Head crashes can be caused by physical shock, and sometimes by electronic failure.
The Head was torn off!
The first photo demonstrates the head arm with lost head after shock.
The head was torn off, and the bare metal arm with revealed wiring under the missed head is ready for further data destruction on unprotected disks.
The head (pictured right), by contrast, is in perfect shape and looks without any visible faults.
Motor failure
The hard drive features the rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle. During normal operation heads in HDD fly above the data recorded on the disks. Modern HDDs prevent power interruptions from landing its heads in the data zone by moving (parking) the heads to a special landing zone or raising them off the platters. However, abrupt spindle stop caused by defective of damaged bearing cannot prevent the heads from falling in the data zone. Stuck motor usually leads to stuck heads to the disks. The first task for the data recovery lab in this situation is to remove the stuck heads from the platters without further damaging of surface. Then we need carefully replace the whole packet of disks to the new donor’s spindle without any misalignment. The process of disk swapping is critical for data safety. If it was done by any of our competitors, then we cannot guarantee it was done by using the equipment and tools with the same level of precision as we have for this operation in our lab.
Electronic components failure
Most of electronic components of the drive are located on the board attached to the bottom of the drive. But the most sensitive to electrical shock elements are located inside of the drive on the actuator arm. The simple procedure of replacing the failed components or even the whole printed circuit board (drive’s PCB) is not enough for reviving the drive and access the data.
This kind of repair must be combined with HDD hardware inspection and that involves the microcode restoration to original state or its adjusting and reprogramming to match hardware compatibility requirements for modified device.
Scratches and Bad Sectors
A bad sector generally means a sector on a disk drive that cannot be used due to the permanent damage or inability to access it. But differently, bad sector on HDD is typically caused by two reasons: scratches, especially severe ones, and magnetic layer degaussing. Even a little scratch might lead to the catastrophic failure of hard drive heads when drive is powered on. If you continue running the drive, those tiny scratches will definitely grow up to the big and deep ones, that can be visible to the naked eye. For someone it will mean that their data already turned into dust.
We are hard drive data recovery experts
If you have suffered from a hard drive failure, wait no further, as our engineers will race around the clock bringing back every bit you have lost in the shortest amount of time physically possible. DataLab24/7 has the experience to deal with any hard drive failure no matter how severe.