What drivesavers is saying by "physical crash" is that something has happened inside the drive that has allowed something (usually the read heads or arm assembly) to come into contact with the platter when it's spinning. You can usually tell this has happened because the drive will make a grinding or metal-on-metal sound as it tries to spin up, and will get warm very fast. In this case, the magnetic media has been ground off of the surface of the platter, usually in one or more rings around the platters. The data under these rings is totally unrecoverable, as the media has been ground off. Other areas on the drive may be recoverable, but usually the damage occurs where the heads are positioned by default, track 0. Many tracks are damaged when the heads "crash", and the most important information (MDB, partition table, root directory) are all located near track 0 and are probably gone for good. Drive Savers has platter readers, and these can be used to pull raw data off the good areas of the platters, but it's extremely time consuming, difficult, and the data requires extensive post-processing by a data recovery specialist to pull off. If you REALLY wanted your data off there badly, you could probably pay them enough to recover file fragments and blocks of unrecognizable data off the drive. You would be extremely lucky to get any filenames associated with the data recovered.
It all comes down to "how much are you willing to pay"? The author of this article makes it sound like any random joe off eBay can rebuild your hard drive and slap it in a computer and boot up after 5 minutes of work. That's quite a stretch. Simply quickformatting is probably not a good idea, since there are commercially available tools that can reverse that sort of damage. Zero'ing a hard drive, however, is enough to deter anyone that wants to keep the recovery costs under five digits. Anyone that's investing that kind of money on random drives purchased on eBay is not likely to find enough dirt to turn a proffit. Fishing drives out of machines in a bank's dumpster might have a better return on investment, but the last banker I talked with about this said they have a "hammer policy" - hard drives are zero'd, and then opened and the platters beaten repeatedly with a hammer before disposal. Ouch. The NSA would have problems salvaging anything from THAT kind of damage.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Virtual1 @ Dec 19th 2005 2:45AM
What drivesavers is saying by "physical crash" is that something has happened inside the drive that has allowed something (usually the read heads or arm assembly) to come into contact with the platter when it's spinning. You can usually tell this has happened because the drive will make a grinding or metal-on-metal sound as it tries to spin up, and will get warm very fast. In this case, the magnetic media has been ground off of the surface of the platter, usually in one or more rings around the platters. The data under these rings is totally unrecoverable, as the media has been ground off. Other areas on the drive may be recoverable, but usually the damage occurs where the heads are positioned by default, track 0. Many tracks are damaged when the heads "crash", and the most important information (MDB, partition table, root directory) are all located near track 0 and are probably gone for good. Drive Savers has platter readers, and these can be used to pull raw data off the good areas of the platters, but it's extremely time consuming, difficult, and the data requires extensive post-processing by a data recovery specialist to pull off. If you REALLY wanted your data off there badly, you could probably pay them enough to recover file fragments and blocks of unrecognizable data off the drive. You would be extremely lucky to get any filenames associated with the data recovered.
It all comes down to "how much are you willing to pay"? The author of this article makes it sound like any random joe off eBay can rebuild your hard drive and slap it in a computer and boot up after 5 minutes of work. That's quite a stretch. Simply quickformatting is probably not a good idea, since there are commercially available tools that can reverse that sort of damage. Zero'ing a hard drive, however, is enough to deter anyone that wants to keep the recovery costs under five digits. Anyone that's investing that kind of money on random drives purchased on eBay is not likely to find enough dirt to turn a proffit. Fishing drives out of machines in a bank's dumpster might have a better return on investment, but the last banker I talked with about this said they have a "hammer policy" - hard drives are zero'd, and then opened and the platters beaten repeatedly with a hammer before disposal. Ouch. The NSA would have problems salvaging anything from THAT kind of damage.