Recently we had received one unknown brand of the hard disk from one of the customers. This customer had already sent this hard disk for several data recovery center, but none of them would able to recover his data back, so this customer searches the data recovery center from google, and find our company for the last try.

When our data recovery engineer first received this hard disk, he discovers that this is the new type of hard disk which using the sticker to act as the cover, but now the issue is the sticker was already missing, which means the dust would go inside the hard disk, damage the disk surface.

The normal hard disk with the sticker will look like this

Usually this kind of case, our engineer will properly reject the case as it is much difficult to recover the data back, as we know that the dust or powder already go into the disk, there had little chance for our data recovery engineer to recover the data back, but we still want to give our best to help our customer to recover the data, as we believe that every data is important to our customer.

When coming to the opening of the hard disk, our engineer wen inside the clean room, the reason was to prevent any dust fall on the disk surface, which most of data recovery center do not have such facility, thus cause high failure rate.

Upon opening, as what our data recovery engineer had suspect previously, the surface of the disk had a lot of dust and powder, also there had some scratch on the surface, see the picture below.

Even if we help to clean off the dust and powder, we still cannot recover the data as there had a lot scratch on the surface of the disk which makes the recovery process more difficult to recover. So our data recovery engineer had no chance but to reject this case.

In the end, our data recovery engineer wants to give an advice to all the customer, do not send in the hard disk without the sticker as usually this type of case we had a low recovery rate of 1 out 10.