This hard drive was delivered to our Malvern office and was contained in a Seagate Extension Portable Drive. The client said that it was dropped and was not detecting and was making a faint rhythmic buzzing noise.
On inspection, we discovered that the drive was not spinning and it would have to go into the clean room environment.
We took it in and opened the drive and found that the heads had fused to the platters stopping the drive from spinning. We were able to carefully extract the heads from the platter and place them back on the ramp without damaging platters or heads.
After some time, we were able to stabilise the drive and recover data from it. There was extreme damage to the platters so once stabilised, we were able to avoid the damaged part of the platter and recover quite a bit of data (around 80-90%) . the drive failed many times during the recovery, but we were able to re-stabilise it and keep recovering.
The client was happy with what we had achieved and received the data within a few days.
