Recovery From Physical Failures
Now here is where things get expensive. Data recoveries from physical failures are expensive, and should not be done by anyone without the proper equipments. Only data recovery professionals should be doing data recovery here.
Signs Of Physical Failure
Physical Data Recovery
Physical data recovery requires parts or components of the data storage media to be replaced. This is a time consuming and tedious procedure, and requires many man hours and labour.
All this is done in a class 100 clean lab and can and should only be done by trained professionals, not some shop who barely knows the difference between USB and parallel connections.
Assessment
Assessment, evaluation or appraisal, which ever you name it, is done first to determine what kind of failure has occurred and what needs to be done. Whether the PCB board components of the board itself require replacement, or the platters need to be transferred to another similar hard disk.
Repair Work
Once this assessment is done, repair is done so that data can be read off the platters as per normal. This usually requires replacements of parts, and hard disk manufacturers don’t sell this parts (you’re not supposed to repair hard disk’s yourself anyways). Thus, another hard disk of the same model AND batch is required.
Sometimes, even though the same hard disk model is found, if it from a different batch, the parts inside is different. Thus, data recovery companies keep stock of hard disk parts so that time is not wasted in searching for the parts.
Platter swapping, PCB replacement amongst others should be done professionally and in a class 100 clean lab. Do not attempt it your self UNLESS you have no important data on the disk.
Logical Data Recovery
After the necessary repair work is done, and if the platters themselves are not damaged much, data can be accessed as per normal.
However, if on top of physical data loss, you suffer from logical data loss, such as bad sectors, data corruption and so on, logical data recovery is needed.
