On the weekday we received an urgent call of a seagate external harddisk case. He has sent it to a few data recovery centers and spent an amount of money for “Evaluation Fee” but couldn’t get it recovered. The customer is almost giving up and not willing to pay anything unless it could be covered. After discussion, we agreed on free evaluation and made an appointment.

While receiving it, we see the hard disk model is ST2000LM007, which is very popular in the market. Obviously it was opened and has not been sealed nicely.

Customer has shown the previous diagnosis report, stating that the “disk platter was scratched and unable to recover”.

Like this condition, we won’t power on the disk as it may cause deadly damage to the disk. Our Engineer carefully opened it in the Class-100 clean room, it could be seen that the arm of HSA(Head Set Assembly) is bent, maybe due to some kind of external forces. One of the magnetic head was dropped onto the platter. In addition, the platter was dust polluted. However, good news is that the platter is still in recoverable condition!

Our Engineer spend another day working on this

1. Remove the dropped magnetic head from platter
2. Wash / clean the platters by chemical
3. Replace HSA
4. Adjust the firmware and make the new HSA to match with patient hdd.
5. Clone all sectors to a new disk

The cloning process takes 2 days and more than 99.99% are recovered.

Partition is protected by bitlocker, and customer is very happy seeing this screen.