Oh no...This black element you see between the platters is called 'slider'.
Data Recovery Mechanical Case - Slider
It is part of the heads assembly and should be on them, instead of cruising around the drive :(
Data Recovery Mechanical Case - Slider
This usually means platter damage -- which means loss of data.
How much loss is yet to be determined.
Don't worry -- it's our everyday thing to recover data from HDD!
We recover data from hard drives regardless of the operating system (Windows, Linux, MacOS, SCO etc) and our equipment is compatible with all hard drive brands (Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Maxtor, Hitachi/IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, HP, Quantum etc).
If your drive has stopped responding, if you accidentally dropped it and is no longer recognized by your PC, if it makes strange sounds, it is very important to do absolutely nothing on your own because you could make things worse resulting in higher recovery costs and compromising your data recovery success possibilities.
In all these cases please power off your hard drive and contact us (210 3314829 for Athens, 2310.402675 for Thessaloniki or for emergency cases call 6946.908811) and one of our experienced technicians will guide you to your next steps in order to have a free evaluation of the damage.
Finally, we would like you to pay attention to the following very important information regarding data recovery:
- Hard drives contain sensitive mechanical parts. Only specialised technicians with the right equipment should have access to these parts. Do not try to access the drive's internal parts in order to fix the damage yourselves. In 99.999% of the cases your drive will be non-recoverable after you have messed with it. Mainly because the distance between the heads and the platters is so small that even a dust particle can damage it. For this reason, hard drives are opened inside a Clean Room which is dust and humidity free.
- Finally, it is important to know that in order for a drive to be operational its heads are positioned with 0.001mm accuracy. Without having the right equipment which will retain the alignment, the drive will be 100% non-recoverable.
- During the recovery process it is not your own drive that is fixed. We just replace the damaged parts in order to make it as functional as possible. We then proceed in copying your functional data. At the end of the process your drive is returned to you in its initial state, that is, non-functional. In the cases where this method is not effective we follow another approach. Which includes transferring the drive's platters to another drive.