Recovery from a disk with fire and water damage

We recently received a hard drive that had been in a fire, after which the fire brigade had drowned it with their water hoses. That was a fun challenge.

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When opening we were shown this. When testing the magnetic material, this turned out to be OK; so there was still a good chance that the data was intact.

We got to work without delay, and after hours of intensive work we got this result:

New housing, new read heads, new magnets, but of course the same data carriers. What we saw then made us lose heart. Apparently someone had rotated the disc before she came to us, with the water and dirt in it.

It is not clearly visible in this photo, but the top is full of small circular scratches, caused by the reading heads moving over them with dirt particles between them. These scratches were not visible under the dirt, otherwise we would most likely have rejected the job. The underside was visually in better condition. We were able to get the drive to boot (after some tweaking) and even start reading data, but we quickly noticed this pattern:

Green means: good data; yellow and white have yet to be read or have been skipped; black is not readable. Here the read heads also appear to have made invisible scratches in the magnetic material, causing the data to be damaged to such an extent that it is unusable. If the drive had been left undisturbed before it came to us, we could very likely have saved the data, but unfortunately we had to give up. Too bad.