ST500DM002 Physical Data Recovery Case Report
Object: Data Recovery from Scratched Seagate 500DM002 Hard Drive.
Power on test: 3 Seconds’ power on test, clicking with symptom of scratches, power off immediately to avoid further damages.
Basic Status: Opened in the clean room, the scratches are visible on the outer tracks and under the microscope there are also some scratches on the inner tracks. Details are shown in the following image:
This hard drive has one platter and two heads. Because of the bad head, the platter has been scratched on outer and inner tracks. Therefore, it has been a more serious and difficult case for data recovery, as the data and firmware saved in the platter has been damaged in the scratched surface areas.
Process: Our engineers have bent the upper head up to keep the head parallel with the platter so that the damaged heads won’t scratch the platters any more. Then connect this hard drive to our data recovery equipment, this hard drive can be detected but data in it can’t be read because of firmware failure. With the single head to solve the problem of firmware is a quite difficult task, so we have transferred this case to our top-level clean room engineers, and they are trying hard to read the data from the unscratched areas, which is also the technical challenge in data recovery field.
Most data recovery companies in the world give up these kind of cases directly because it is impossible for them to get the data back. As for Dolphin team, we may do something more on this case but we don’t guarantee 100% success on these cases and we will offer further report on this case in the next following days.
