Why Platter Damage Ruins the Chances of Hard Drive Data Recovery

If you've sent a hard drive to a data recovery company, you may have heard about platter damage, a condition which renders failed hard drives completely unrecoverable. Here's a look at what platter damage is, and why hard drives with platter damage can't be recovered.

What Is Platter Damage?

Platter damage, or rotational scoring, is direct damage to the platters of a hard drive. Those platters contain all of your data, so it's the most severe type of hard drive failure issue possible when data recovery is considered. Platter damage may affect all of the information on a hard drive or only a certain bit of data.

How Does Platter Damage Occur?

Platter damage occurs when the heads of a hard drive fail and come into contact with the platters while they're spinning. This creates a ring of damage on the hard drive, called rotational damage, where the data is irreversibly damaged. The longer a damaged hard drive runs with damaged heads, the better the chances of the platter damage being more severe, and in most cases, more data is damaged as the drive continues to try to read. For this reason, it's important to instantly turn off any hard drive that exhibits a clicking sound or any other sort of symptom of head damage. Not all head crashes cause platter damage, and not every hard drive failure results from a failure of the heads, as the hard drive electronics can also fail, as can the spindle and other parts of the drive.

What Can Be Done?

If platter damage is only in a certain, very restricted area of a hard drive, sometimes a data recovery engineer can recover a partial copy of the data that was on the drive by reading around the damage. This is done by first repairing the hard drive heads (in most cases, this means replacing them) and then reading up to the damaged section, then the heads are turned off and restarted at an area past the damage. It's an incredibly precise technique and can only be done by professionals. In some cases, platter damage is to severe, and any attempt to read the damaged hard drive ruins the new set of heads that have been installed. In these cases, data is not recoverable by any means; in fact, the data itself is no longer physically on the hard drive.

Have you had an experience with data recovery? Post in our comments section below.