Help with physically damaged HDD

K

Kongar

Gawd
Joined
Oct 25, 2004
Messages
753
So my cousin is a reasearch student working on his PhD. Apparently ALL his research (code, data, everything) was on an external usb hard drive (hdd not ssd) Somehow it fell far/hard enough to physically break. Now apparently he’s an idiot, because he has no backups. :whistle:

So he tells me he sent the drive to the manufacturer and also to some data recovery place. Both said there is no data to salvage.

How is this possible? I can certainly see the drive malfunctioning, or even some damaged platter surface - but surely there has to be some recoverable data - no?

I mean isn’t that the whole point of low level formats and whatnot? I’d like to help a brother out (even though he deserves it for not having backups) it’s a fairly big deal for him.

He’s given up so I could take a crack at it with a tool, or send it somewhere proven (does the NSA do charity work?) Lol :ROFLMAO:. I just find it hard to believe that ALL his data is gone. He’s got to still have some options...

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Thanks
Kongar
 
Drive already sent to the manufacturer and a data recovery place with no success? He’s fucked.
 
Affordable data recovery processes rely on the drive's controller (or a surrogate) to access the media. If there's platter damage, that's not going to happen. The next option is to scan the platters with very expensive and slow equipment that will run some statistical analysis on the patterns it pick up off the bare platters to see if there's any discernible data. That tends to be less than reliable while extremely expensive and time consuming.
 
Which recovery service and what did they do? To recover from a dead drive, I assume the usual procedure is to transplant the platters into an identical drive.
 
And the most important lesson he learned had nothing to do with the curriculum....
 
On Halt and Catch Fire (season 4) Donna and Camron tried to recover data from a failed hard drive - didn't go well.
 
Sounds to me like it fell hard enough to damage / shatter the drive platters and then you are screwed. Shatter a cd and then try recovering the data. That's basically the same problem you have here. Tell him to start over on his PhD and stop being a stupid *insert curseword here* and do backups (YES PLURAL!)
 
I doubt the manufacturer tried to do anything and there're varying quality recovery services. Which one was it?
 
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