Hard Drive Data Recovery Services

Hard Drive Data Recovery

Hard drives, often referred to as HDDs, are a name sometimes given to any data-storing component.  In the context of hard drive data recovery services, it is in reference to mechanical drives with spinning platters inside.  They can suffer from types of damage not experienced by other technologies like SSDs, flash storage, and optical media.  Despite that, they have a number of advantages over other data storage technologies, including high cost-effectiveness, high reliability, and excellent data retention in cold (long-term unpowered) storage.  Because of this, they are the most common data storage technology in use today.  They make up the vast majority of storage devices we recover from, so we have a wealth of experience with them.

Why choose us?

Simple process Simple process
We do the hard work so you don’t have to worry.
Certified experts Certified experts
We have certifications from all over the world.
Latest equipment Latest equipment
We regularly update our state of the art recovery equipment.
Free diagnostic Free diagnostic
No commitment. You decide if you want to proceed with recovery.
100% Confidentiality 100% Confidentiality
Our #1 rule here in Platinum Data Recovery.
High success rate High success rate
We are proud to have the highest success in the industry.

Data recovery solutions

So many things can go wrong with hard drives that can eventually lead to data loss. If enough time goes by, that loss becomes permanent. Take advantage of our free diagnostic offer.

No matter how complex the project is, we can recover the data when other data recovery companies can’t. We have the testimonial letters from our previous customers to back that up.

Data recovery engineer in the cleanroom

Trusted by

Senate of the United States
Senate of the United States
Universal Studios
A Nordstrom Company
Los Angeles Superior Court
University of California
United States Senate
“There was a technical problem with some equipment which your firm was able to resolve with great speed and wonderful results.”
Paul Strauss,
United States Senator for the D. C.
Universal Studios
“In a short period of time, Platinum was able to recover 100% of my data and I was back in business planning and scheduling my pre-summer projects”
Steve Hamm,
Director of Technical Services
A Nordstrom Company
“I would personally like to thank David Green and the Platinum Data Recovery team for saving important data that we needed to perform critical historical reports”
Mohamud Mahmoud,
Sr. Systems Administrator
Los Angeles Superior Court
“Platinum Data Recovery are very professional and pleasant to work with. When I called them with this emergency situation, they helped us recover all the data”
Luis Moreno,
Computer Support Supervisor
UCLA
“What I like about Platinum Data Recovery is that all of my emails and phone calls received prompt replies, and I am especially relieved that all my files were recovered”
Seth Putterman,
Professor

Our certifications

Apple Cyber Security Microsoft Certified Pro Microsoft Application Developer ISO Clean Room Heawei MSSQL Emerson Oracle

Avoid hard drive recovery DIY

Hard drive recovery is a complex procedure that has a high risk of permanent data loss if you don’t know what you’re doing, especially if hard drive is physically damaged. Our team has a deep understanding of the data recovery process and we’re equipped to handle any unique situation.

We have ISO 5 class 100 cleanroom on site. Our engineers have access to the best data recovery technology available as we constantly upgrade the equipment in our lab.

Data recovery engineer picking a donor drive

Hard drive physical damages and recovery

Read/write heads damage

The heads on a hard drive are intricate in their design and operation, and are typically quite delicate.  While they are analogous to the needle on a record player, they actually operate without contacting the surface they fly over.  They contain tiny wire coils used to read from and write to the magnetic surface of the platters.  A drive typically contains one head per surface, with some of the largest drives containing 10 platters and 20 individual heads.  The heads are manufactured by a complex printing and lamination technique akin to making printed circuit boards, but on a much smaller scale — they’re around the thickness and strength of a piece of clear tape.  Because of their complexity and small size, they are usually the first component to be damaged when a drive begins to fail.  This is especially true for drives that have been dropped or otherwise physically damaged, however heads can begin to fail all on their own given the right (or wrong) combination of factors.  While dealing with damaged heads requires specialized equipment and a clean environment, it is something we do every single day with a very high rate of success.

Media degradation

One of the most common hard drive failure cases is media damage.  With media damage, the cycle tends to look something like the following:

1. some event happens (likely in shipping) where contamination is introduced into the drive.  This contamination us usually a microscopic flake of magnetic coating from the platters

2. the drive is used like normal, until some day by some bad luck the heads seek over the debris, disrupting their flight and allowing the heads to contact the platters

3. new debris is created, which is then spread around the platters by the heads.  If this debris is sufficient to make that area unreadable, the drive may reallocate the data on that area’s associated sector to a spare area

4. go to step 2, repeat until bigger problems crop up like head damage, data loss, or firmware corruption

Damaged media causes damaged heads, which themselves cause more damaged media.  It’s a vicious cycle that worsens over time, with older drives (with lower tolerances and lower recording density) typically handling it better than modern drives.  The last stage of this tends to be the inability to read data from the platters, which manifests the drive being un-detectable and sometimes (but not always) clicking or making unusual sounds.  Damaged heads typically need to be replaced entirely, although in cases of contamination they may just need to be cleaned (along with the rest of the drive).  Cases of severe media damage (where one or more surfaces destroy heads seeking over them) may warrant cutting off corresponding heads to allow reading the undamaged surfaces.  Most drives require firmware modification to work with heads they didn’t ship with, as well as to stabilize them (make them receptive to recovery efforts).

Stuck read/write heads

Stuck heads (also sometimes called “stiction”) are exceedingly rare without accompanying read write physical trauma, especially on modern drives.  On traditional hard drives, the heads fly over the platters on a film of air called an “air bearing” without contact, so under normal operation there is no friction between the two to allow them to stick.  The heads will not even deploy off of the ramp (or parking area) until the drive detects that the platters are spinning at a sufficient RPM to facilitate this air bearing. On older drives, the heads were parked on the platters in a special low-friction zone, but like modern drives the heads would not leave this zone until the drive was up to speed.  In some cases, this low friction coating would fail and the heads would stick to the platters, which is part of why that design is no longer in use.

Truly stuck heads are not exceptionally common on modern drives that park their heads on a ramp, but they can happen when the heads are forced off of the ramp while the platters are stationary (e.g. when the drive is dropped).  On 2.5″ drives, the torque of the motor and strength of the voice coil actuator (the part that moves the heads) are not always sufficient to overcome the friction between the heads and the platters in this situation.  Many drives designed to be portable have a mechanical lock that keeps the heads from deploying when the platters are not spinning, however this lock is not always effective.  Stiction is even rarer on 3.5″ drives, since the motor typically has plenty of torque to rip the heads free (or off entirely).

Clicking is not a symptom of stuck heads — that sound is the heads resetting to the parked position, meaning that they can’t be stuck.  The most common symptom of stuck heads is a chirping sound made by the motor trying and failing to spin up, accompanied by the complete lack of sound / vibration associated with the platters spinning.  While stuck heads are often accompanied by some amount of head and media damage, resolving the “stuck” part of the problem is typically an easy task.  This is typically quite recoverable, as the related damage is usually localized to a small area of the platters.

Seized motor

A seized motor is fairly rare on modern drives.  It typically occurs in one of two cases:

* when the spindle motor bearings bind with age / wear

* when a drive is dropped

Modern drives use fluid dynamic bearings and are nigh immune to bearing seizure during regular wear or cold storage, but this was not an uncommon failure mode for older drives.  In the case of a dropped drive, the spindle can wedge into the bearings and restrict its ability to move normally.  Modern manufacturing tolerances make this both difficult to do as well as difficult to undo.  This is one of the rare cases where a specialist may resort to moving the platters to another drive (along with the numerous hurdles that accompany that).

Damaged PCB / electronics

PCB damage is most commonly the result of a power surge, caused by things like an incorrect power supply (to an external enclosure) or using the wrong modular PSU power cables.  PCB damage tends to be on the lowest side of the price spectrum as it does not usually require uncommon tools to diagnose or repair.  The PCB is studded with components that self-sacrifice to prevent damage to components that would complicate recovery.  One notable exception to this is damage to the preamp, which is an internal component that requires clean-room work to replace.  While this operation does require skill, a clean room, and donor parts, the chances of success are extremely high as the most critical components of the drive should be untouched.  The majority of drives suffering from a damaged preamp after a power surge are older models from Western Digital.

Hard drive logical issues and recovery

Logical issues are problems that are independent of the physical state of the drive.  They are typically caused by software, malware, user error, operating system bugs, failed updates, improper shutdowns, poor file system implementation, and so on.  Logical issues are typically the easiest to recover from, but there are exceptions.  Some logical issues are symptoms of physical issues, so identifying the cause of the issue is just as important as knowing how to resolve it.  Here are some of the most common logical issues:

Deleting/Formatting

Recoverability after deleting / formatting a drive is dependent on a number of factors.  The technology used by the drive, the exact way in which data was deleted / formatted, the original file system, presence or absence of encryption, how much new data written to the drive, etc..  In most cases, the majority of data is recoverable.

File system corruption

File system corruption can have a number of causes, from interrupted delayed writes to malware to drive failure.  The success of recovery is dependent on the cause of the corruption and what fragments of the file system are still present and interpretable.  The ability to piect together file system fragments and extrapolate missing file system information is what sets software recovery tools apart from one another.  In the worst cases (where the file system cannot be interpreted / reassembles), recovery is done via search-by-file signature (aka “carving” or “raw scanning”) wherein the tool reads the drive from end to end pulling out contiguous ranges of data that resemble known file types.  These files will lack file system information like name, date, or folder structure.  This type of recovery is generally a last resort.

Corrupted firmware

In most cases, the hard drive’s firmware resides partially or entirely on the platters in a special fault-tolerant region called the Service Area.  Because this is on the platters, it is subject to damage in similar ways to other data on the drive.  Most commonly, firmware damage is a symptom or bad sectors / media degradation in the exact wrong location.  Luckily, this is typically an easy job for specialist hardware interface tools to deal with.

One noteworthy hurdle that has become increasingly common is UNMAP, a technology found on certain SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) hard drives.  SMR technology has allowed for a significant increase in data storage density.  It also creates an extra level of abstraction that both increases the drive’s performance (in a way similar to SSD’s TRIM) and complicates recovery (also similar to SSD’s TRIM).  Unlike SSD TRIM, though, the chances of recovery with specialist tools remains decent.

Virus / malware

Viruses and malware can cause data loss in a number of different ways, including rendering the operating system inoperable, deleting files for the sake of vandalism, and encrypting personal data for ransom (ransomware).  In the case of the former two, data recovery is a matter of interpreting remnants of the file system and / or excavating files without a file system.  In the case of the ransomware, data recovery hinges on finding non-overwritten data, incompletely encrypted files, and the presence of public decryption keys.  The percentage of recoverable data in the case of a virus attack is highly variable, and depends on the specific malware variant, the length of time the malware was active, and the method by which the malware operates.

On the topic of DIY recovery

While DIY recovery can be viable in certain cases, nothing is without risk, and no avenue has a higher chance of success than going to a specialist.  Many cases are extremely easy to misdiagnose, and most cases involve active degradation of data.  Approaching DIY recovery with the wrong technique / tools / expectations can and often will lead to further data loss, especially with the vast majority of DIY data recovery advice being outdated, incorrect, or self-serving.  If going to a specialist is an option on the table, start out with one.  We offer diagnostics for little to nothing, and we will always be honest about the chances of success — you can proceed however you see fit from there.

Tips from a hard drive recovery experts to improve your chances of a successful recovery:

* Stop using and disconnect your hard drive.

In case of physical and logical damage, leaving the drive on can make the case more complicated and lead to further data loss.  For mechanical damage, the drive is typically degrading whenever it has power.  In case of logical damage, operating system background processes may cause overwriting and / or low-level drive background maintenance may “clean up” recoverable data.  Powering the drive off ASAP is always the best course of action, putting a stop to any worsening physical and logical damage.

* Note the timeline of data loss.

Try to remember what happened before, during, and after the data loss happened. Note down any details about the event — did you drop it (ever), was there a power surge, etc..  Include any odd behavior leading up to the incident if the cause isn’t abundantly clear (like a drop).  Every detail will help engineers make the recovery process easier.

* Protect your drive from further trauma

Make sure not to drop or shake your drive. Keep it away from extreme temperatures. Further hard drive damage will make a recovery much harder.

* Do not use any file system repair tools (e.g. chkdsk, First Aid, Windows’ Scan and Fix, fsck, DiskWarrior, etc.)

Some native and third-party tools will offer to fix your hard drive. Using these tools may result in permanent data loss as they are designed to make your hard drive work again, but they do not prioritize the safety of your important data.

Notable hard drive technologies

Hybrid hard drives

Hybrid hard drives outwardly look like a traditional mechanical hard drive, but also contain a small amount of solid-state storage on their PCB for quick access and caching.  In most cases, failure of the mechanical <i>or</i> solid state portion will render the drive inoperable.  These drives are currently few and far between, but we’ve seen our fair share of them and are familiar with the unconventional recovery process.

SMR hard drives

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) is a technology that has allowed for increased data storage density at a greatly reduced cost.  This introduces a layer of abstraction called a Translator (which is also found in SSDs) that maps logical sectors to physical sectors.  When data is deleted from a SMR drive, the drive can behave like a SSD and simply remove the logical sector from the translator.  This is called UNMAP, and it is similar to TRIM on SSDs.  This makes deleted data from UNMAP-enabled SMR hard drives a sinificantly more complex process than it is for drives using other recording technologies (Conventional Magnetic Recording and Perpendicular Magnetic Recording).

Helium hard drives

Helium filled drive technology has allowed for unprecedented data storage density.  The first helium-filled HDDs were available for sale around 2013, they were primarily seen in servers and data centers where recovery from failures were a non-issue due to backups and redundancy.  Until recently, it was almost unheard of to see these drives in the hands of consumers.  There has been a sudden and significant uptick in recovery cases involving them, though.  While these drives overall tend to be reliable, they can be mechanically damaged like any other mechanical drive.  Mechanical repair of helium drives provide new and unique challenges for data recovery specialists.  These include

* difficult disassembly — opening helium drives require a tool similar to a can opener to remove the helium-impermeable lid.  This relatively contaminative procedure tends to introduce debris into the drive and necessitate cleaning every single time the drive is opened.

* extremely expensive drives — research and development on a new drive model requires multiple identical drives to be purchased and disassembled / reassembled for practice and for parts.  Helium drives have a base cost well above most traditional drives, and have much lower availability to further drive up the cost.

* exceedingly delicate internal components — the read/write heads of helium drives are much smaller and more delicate than those of traditional drives.  Couple that with most helium drives having 16-24 heads and the margin for error goes way down.

* extra complex firmware — due to additional sensors and purposeful obfuscation (to maintain trade secrets), firmware decompilation and interfacing is much more difficult than most drives.  This is an issue most commonly seen with NVMe SSDs.  Decompiling firmware for common drives is typically done by dedicated outfits that do nothing else, but drives with less market share have the low to nonexistent priority among such places.  For helium drives, firmware manipulation techniques are typically developed in-house.

* negatively pressurized helium refilling — as if opening a helium drive wasn’t hard enough, getting the helium back into the drive is even harder.  The drive must be refilled with helium to the same pressure as the factory, and the drive must be temporarily sealed in a way that still allows for proper airflow within the case.  Because helium is almost impossible to trap, this is done in a helium filled enclosure.  In many cases, this helium must be positively or negatively pressurized, and the drive may very well destroy itself if the pressure is not correct.  A small subset of helium drives can be run on air, but this is not the norm and requires tricking the helium level sensor into thinking the drive is properly filled.

* few to no commercial tools for repair — the hardware to cut open the drives are not standardized.  The head combs to separate and hold the heads are rare if not nonexistent.  No company is manufacturing helium atmosphere clean-air enclosures for refilling.  Commercial tools for firmware manipulation are nonexistent.  Most of these tools must be developed in-house.

* high recording density — the higher the recording density, the more catastrophic media damage tends to be.  This is because the same amount of damage affects more data.  Helium drives tend to have higher recording densities than traditional drives, and this is a major factor in the success rate of recovery.

* holding up data recovery hardware for days / weeks / months at a time.  Due to the cost of these tools and the constant demand for them, helium drive recovery is still a costly service even for the relatively basic issues.

At the moment, mechanical recovery of helium drives is a service offered by very few labs that commands a high price, however, most if not all of these issues are ones that should be overcome given enough time, bring the price of recovery down with it.

FAQ

My HDD is clicking.  What could it be and what do I do?

Clicking can be a symptom of dozens of different potential issues, the overwhelming majority of which can only be diagnosed and recovered by a specialist.  While most of these issues will require clean room work and donor parts, some do not.  One of the few things that is absolutely guaranteed if a drive is clicking is that the heads are not stuck to the platters or stuck on the ramp.  This is because the clicking noise is the sound of the heads being retracted to the ramp.  If a drive containing important data starts making any unusual sounds, power it off and seek out a specialist.

I / someone else opened my hard drive outside of a clean environment.  How bad is that and what should I do now?

First and foremost, keep it off.  Contrary to popular belief, opening a hard drive does not in-and-of-itself cause data loss, but running a drive that has been contaminated does.  The heads fly over the surface of the platters on a film of air called an “air bearing”, and debris as small as a smoke particle is sufficient to interrupt that and cause head-to-platter contact.  That causes data loss.  We see user-opened drives fairly often, and in most cases they are only marginally worse off than non-opened drives.  Pre-opened drives require a drive decontamination process (typically a non-refundable fee) before the process of recovery can begin, though.

I read that freezing my hard drive will fix it.  Should I do that?

No.  For any even remotely modern drive, evidence of this working is purely anecdotal.  This trick does have factual roots — long long ago, there were drives that parked their heads on the platters.  Carefully changing the temperature of the drive (and then fully bringing it back to room temperature) was one of a few tricks that could be applied to break the heads free.  At best this will do nothing to a modern drive, and in many cases it will in most cause head and media damage, significantly reducing the likelihood of success for a specialist attempt.

My drive says it needs to be formatted / initialized when plugged in — what should I do?

Unless this is a brand new drive with no data on it, do not format or initialize it.  Initializing and formatting are never a step towards data recovery, and will only hinder any proper recovery attempt.  This can be a symptom of logical damage, firmware damage, or physical damage.  In any case, seek out a specialist.

I dropped my hard drive and now it doesn’t work. Can you recover it?

Dropped hard drives are our bread and butter — in most cases, yes.  Recovery will almost always require clean room work to assess the drive after a drop, but donor parts may not be necessary.  The most critical thing to do is to keep the drive off.  Dropped hard drives are mechanically damaged, and there is no mechanical repair that can be done in a DIY context.

I dropped my hard drive and it does seem to still work.  Should I be worried?

Many drives have mechanisms to prevent the heads from leaving their designated location when they aren’t supposed to, but that does not guarantee that the heads are safe from damage due to impact.  While nearly all drives travel through a somewhat treacherous postal service on their way to the end user, they still have significant dead-on-arrival and early drive failure statistics.  In that example, they are also excessively packaged specifically to protect from impact.
In many cases (especially with older drive models), an impact is the catalyst for a gradual but exponentially worsening failure.  If your data is accessible, back it up immediately (starting with the most critical files).  Do not walk away during this — if your data is suddenly not accessible or any other unusual behavior occurs (e.g. the whole computer becomes sluggish), power the drive off and seek out a specialist.  If you successfully retrieve your data, validate it (open the most important files to ensure they’re intact) and decide how to proceed with the original drive — ideally, it should be replaced.  At bare minimum, ensure that it is never again entrusted with the only copy of any irreplaceable data.

My computer says my hard drive needs to be repaired / fixed before it can be used.  What should I do?

Your operating system (most often Windows) will prompt for file system repair when it detects file system corruption.  There are a number of reasons this can happen, but one of the most common logical reasons is an interrupted delayed write operation, such as unplugging a drive without ejecting it or powering off your computer during use.  This can also be an early symptom of drive failure.  The tools your operating system will use to attempt file system repair basically always assume the damage is logical, which leads them to cause *much* more harm in cases of drive failure.  If at all possible, decline the prompt and attempt to access the drive without any kind of “repair” or “fix” operation.  If the drive is not accessible, seek out a specialist.

I reinstalled my operating system and now my files are gone.  Can you get them back?

Recoverability in this case depends on the technology used by the drive, how much data was overwritten, presence / absence of complicating factors like encryption, and the original file system of the drive.  In most cases with HDDs, the vast majority of data is recoverable, but there are exceptions.

I have found a drive that has been without power for an extended length of time.  Will it still work?

Most likely, yes.  With the exception of drives that have been stored in poor conditions, hybrid drives, and a select few problematic models, hard drives tend to survive in “cold storage” (unused and disconnected from power) quite well.  Most hard drives will remain measurably unchanged for a decade or more in cold storage.  If you know the data on an old drive is important, though, do be prepared to power the drive off at the first sign of trouble and seek out a specialist to diagnose.