Hard Drive Platter Extraction... #technology

My customer was copying 3 terabytes of pictures out of his hard drive and while it was reading, his cat rolled up and knocked it off the table. I hovered the data but they had no luck. I'm always scared to what a head stack looks like. This is what reads and writes the files from the platters. And this one head is missing. Using my last brain cell, I would assume that the head is stuck to the platter's surface. So this is our plan. Let's remove the platters from the hard drive, find that missing head, and then analyze all the platters for any missing heads. So let's carefully pop it off the platter and we need to be extremely careful not

to touch the surface. Now we have to lock in. We have to carefully clean and analyze all of these platters and if it's ok the platters look surprisingly good with no deep scratches at a level 6 and no deep grooves at a level 7. Now we need a fresh pair of replacement heads. Then we can install it into my customer's drive and boom the hardware part of this job is done. Easy enough, let's keep going. Let's plug in some SATA cables along with the terminal adapter to talk to the drive. Let's tell the drive to unlock the ROM so we can access the service area. After doing this we have full control of its brain. Then

let's tech unlock the drive and we can see that we have a proper ID and we have full access to the firmware which is amazing. The first thing we need to do is back up all of the important service area files. Most of these files are unique to the drive so if they become corrupt we can lose all of the data and all of our hard work is gone. There's two copies of the service area on this drive and we can see that one of the media cache files is damaged. But when we go to sector edit we can see that we actually

have full access to the data. Let's go ahead and edit some firmware to stabilize the drive before we start reading any data. And while I was doing this, the second copy of the media cache file became corrupt, bricking the drive. So now we can see that the drive is stuck in a busy state. This is why we always back up the service area first, because things can just catastrophically fail. So we had to lock in and upload the translator and the media cache files to the RAM. Now if we open Data Extractor we can see all of the files and we can see that the data

adds up to 3.5 terabytes. Let's image the hard drive and his data is saved. Let's image the hard drive and his data is saved. If you need something recovered the link is in the bio piece.