any other local Hard Disk Data Recovery specialist (scratched hard disk platter?

[dta]

An acquaintance of mine told me her mom's office has a hard disk that failed (Seagate ST3500413AS) and they already had it sent to a local data recovery facility (ISS-EYAN) to try data recovery.

She forwarded me a copy of the report given by the data recovery facility:

We regret to inform you that we are unable to recover your files due to scratched disk inside your hard drive.

The magnetic platters of the hard disk have been scratched by the read/write arm of the drive. This might happen when anxious users try to start the computer again and again after the hard drive has failed. Even after the drive crashes, its read/write arm still rests on the platters and damages it when the drive starts to spin.

I didn't ask my acquaintance what kind of data is on the hard drive, but apparently it is very important, thus the need to find other data recovery specialists.

Any idea if there are facilities who might still process such kinds of requests and possibly how much they charge?

I've already mentioned to her that with a scratched disk platter, it's likely that large portions of data are irretrievably gone, but is it still possible to have some data intact in such a case?

[Louie]

Whatever happened to this? Unless you have a drive that's not fragmented at all, not all data per file would be sequential. Really depends on how large her files are so I would agree with you that they probably won't find anything much of value. And also, I would imagine that you would need professional services to retrieve such data directly from the platter.

By the way, I thought drives nowadays would autopark the head so that they don't scratch the platter?