I hope I never have to use your services, but you're probably the first company I'll call if it comes to that. Great video, and great job!

It is always a privilege to watch a master at work, regardless of the profession.

Nice Recovery......I had 2 drives crashed on me on a raid 5 and I didn't have a backup. I lost my data. I learned my lesson, Now I save all my data on my Google Drive ...and now I never have to worrying about a drive failing and losing my data. Cloud Storage is the answer.

Almost midnight in the mid of a work week, and I watched close to 40min video on HDD data recovery :)

Thanks for the video. I've had my share of hard drives I had to recover for clients. Nothing as professional as replacing the heads but I know what a pain it can be to have a barely holding on for dear life drive and recovering sectors, skipping sectors to try to get it to read in a different way. Just great job on this video. I always told my customers to spend the cash and have it done professionally. It's worth it and leaps and bounds better chance for successful recovery then just me possibly doing further damage by pushing it further and further into unrecoverable state.

the guy recovering: * heavy sweating *

great video! I should send this to all my clients who think I can snap my fingers and magically make their dead drives work

I could just listen. Work of a professional. Like music to my ears.

I have swapped controller boards on a 250 GB SATA Maxtor that had something metal fall on it while powered up and exploded the controller board, and it did work (with a bit of strange behavior). It was from the same model, but completely different serial number, and manufactured like a year later, and the donor drive had mechanical faults and would not calibrate. When I powered it up the first time, it made some strange noises and took a few attempts to calibrate, but did start working and has continued to work fine since. And that was about 5 years ago (though I don't use it often anymore). The only strange behavior was that I had one particular computer where it would cause the BIOS to hang while detecting the drive if connected while booting, but hotplugging it worked fine. There was nothing critical on this drive, so it wasn't worth paying to have it recovered, it just saved time and I wanted to have a working drive. The moral of the story is, despite what he said, if your data is not critical and you aren't going to send it to be recovered, I'd say it is worth it to try a board swap, if you happen to have one available.

This was both very interesting and relaxing to watch.

60k photos on a Seagate dude rolled the dice for sure

Very much appreciate the video presentation. I know data recovery can be time consuming, expensive with no guarantee. It's why I do my best to advise my customers the importance of backups.

3 am . Los Angeles.. simply a good expending time viewing this video. thanks

I like how measured his movements are. i love looking at this

Nice to see it was someone willing to recover their family photos and memories, and not some scumbag's plot to destroy the world. Great job.

The irony when "My Documents Backup" is on a drive that needed to be recovered

Thanks for sharing - you have amazing patience!

Good job, nice presentation of the data recovery process.

Welp. 50.000 photos on an external seagate drive. That's a disaster waiting to happen

Strangely relaxing ..

Fascinating, thanks for sharing!

very cool videos. Keep it up!

This is really interesting and appreciate your professionalism. I've moved away from storing any data that is critical on single drives and moved to Raid 6/10 or ZFS, with additional data backup policies. I treat my hard drives with the expectation that they will fail eventually. For the price of recovery, you can just buy a new drive or two.

Awesome video and congrats on the successful recovery!!

All that technical details... looks like each data recovery is a case study.

I always handled hard drives with so much care, but now i think I will with even more. They are such amazing and complex devices that need all that care. When i see someone carelessly putting their laptop on a desk and hear it hitting the desk i cringe so much

Cool video. Thanks for posting. It amazes me that people still don't back up their data. But, hey. Their stupidity is your job security!

I used to do PC repair and one of the worst situations I ran across was a music producer who had about 2 months of audio data on an HDD that went bad and we had to refer him to a data recovery service (though I can't remember if we had specific ones to recommend if they chose that route).

amazing video! congrats on the recovery. I try not to hate on a single company but every drive I have that is in a non-working or barely-working state is a seagate. I just bought a new drive for my server, and decided to go with WD.

I find this all fascinating...very geeky. All I have are Seagate drives lol. Never had a problem in fact I have a drive that I bought in 06. I guess I've been very lucky.

@ACS Data Recovery, Hey guys, in the future before you attempt a head swap double check that the "Pre-Amps" are the same/very similar. To do that connect to Seagate drive through Serial TTL (this one is 1.8V beware to get logic converter! There is schematic for Kindle on the web). Then once in connected to the drive click "ctrl+Z" to get into service mode. Then click "ctrl+l" (its l and not i) to get HDD info, which will show the "Pre-amp" model. Then just compare numbers between patient and donor drives. But in this case I guess you didn't want to power it up at all to avoid further damage. You could cover the motor contacts to prevent the drive from spinning - then it shouldn't try to move the heads. Great job anyway!

Very interesting and educational. But whenever I am disassembling anything I have compartmentalized trays for every part - screws, nuts, connectors, you name it. Just dropping screws on the workbench is begging for a visit from Mr. Murphy! Cheers

Oh gosh I hope the people here in Germany are just as good as you are. I have all of my customers' pictures on there (I'm a photographer) and I'd be screwed if they can't recover my data. I'm so worried.

Thanks for your video, it was really help. i have a question what is the name of the tool to remove the screws for the hard drive. thx

Very informative video. Question: When replacing the motor and chassis from a donor drive but keeping transplanting the original PCB board and platters, can the armature and head assembly from the donor drive be used? Or would that need to be transplanted as well from the original drive? I suspect the original is not required, but just curious.

"He who laughs last must have made a backup!" ;)

I believe I have the same exact issue. my drive just fell Thur. I'm devastated because my computer crashed and they retrieved and backed up everything on this drive. 2 days after receiving my computer back I had this happen. definitely learned my lesson. Everyone please please backup on multiple sources....about how much does this run? a company in my area has already said to only give it to someone with a clean room.

That is why every Sysadmins mantra should be backup once, twice, thrice! Even more so with SSD once they go poof it is game over!

do not power it off? of Corse the customer already tried powering the drive many times before they gave it to you

Very impressive! I enjoy working with both hardware and software on my computers very much and this is one of very few things i would never try at home. Manually editing file systems with a hex editor and dd - yes! Opening the drives and work with the internals - no! Like I said, very impressive!

Fantastic video. I suppose this skill will be a thing of the past in the next few years now that SSD technology is becoming more affordable and reliable. I have just installed 2 Samsung EVO's, one in my laptop and one in my gaming pc and I won't buy another mechanical drive in the future, the performance difference is astonishing.

I've dropped my external 4TB hard drive several times, it still works.

10:41 "scratching our heads" - out of a DR specialist's mouth, that sounds almost like a double entendre.

About 15 years ago I had a Maxtor internal drive that was burning inside the computer.

Great video! Gonna try and do one of these myself. I know, it's harder than it looks, but only one way to learn.

I wanted to commend you all on a great instructional video as to what goes into data recovery. Your methods seem pure and your intentions and resulting costs are true to your trade and expertise. I wanted to ask when shipping a drive through standard services whether it be in for recovery or just normal day-in/day-out transport, what steps for protection do you recommend? When it comes to storing a hard drive archive (digital picture images) do you recommend any special care such as spinning up the hardware quarterly of semi-annually? Do you recommend one drive over another for quality and serviceability in data recovery or are they all about the same? Thanks for the great video!

What size of torx driver do you use for unscrew? T5 ? I am looking for one for PCB torx parts. thank you!

Reminds me I have an "old" WD 200GB (the first 200GB to market IIRC) with a defect, the usual clicking locked head. I guess it's a controler bug .. I wonder how easy it is to fix or swap.

I dropped a WD external drive as it was being written to via a disk refresh program I was trialing. No surprise that it stopped working. Tried it briefly later on (against good advice) and it worked for a short while although a bit slow. Stopped again when warmed up, so with nothing to lose (all the data on the NAS anyway) I put it in the fridge for an hour or two and it worked like normal while really chilled, not sure why this was so but thought it interesting observation.

I'm curious what software you were using? The dialog boxes are DOS 5/6 era MFC controls.

And this, people, is why you have multiple backups of your important files. I have three different backups and the most important stuff is stored in a paid cloud service. It's cheaper to have 3 or 4 external drives than to have a drive recovered - by a LONG shot! I bet this Scott guy ended up paying in the thousands of dollars for this service.

This is actually really interesting to me and I'm learning what I can, even though I don't think these are intended for instructional purposes. However, how would someone go about learning and mastering how to do this correctly? Is there schooling? Or is there some sort of internship one can do? Hope to hear back!

Thanks for a really interesting video. I noticed that a few times you mentioned about trying a different set of heads. Is that because the heads are from a donor drive, and you don't know what condition they are in? Also, could you not buy the heads unused from a manufacturer? finally, are the files recovered using the original name or are they just recovered as File 1, File 2, File 3 etc... Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I'm not really familiar with this stuff.

Thanks for great video, was very interested on how a head swap procedure goes. Any chance you can share the name of the software you all use or is it some inhouse solution or NDA type agreement?

This is fascinating to watch and very informative, but just a tip for future videos, please mount your camera in such a way that your drive work fills the frame, probably from above would be best, and at a slight angle inward - That would provide far better detail, we really don't need to see the technician's body in 80% of the picture, it adds nothing to the content.

RAID saves lives :) Great demo.

Whats is the problem with seagate hard drives. Ive have problems with 2 of this disk with fatal results

I wonder if it'd be possible to reconstruct some of the files from the hexadecimal values shown when you were trying to build the bit map...

we got a hp pc at work right now I had to replace the hdd in it the original was a 2tb Seagate dm family drive that has 7000 bad sectors according to the Linux live cd we used to see if it's accessible. I'm trying to clone it to the new drive but it's looking grim

My seagate 1 tb not detecting by pc and in disk management it shows Unallocated data and not initialise......How to recover that dta?

How much did this specific case cost if you can reveal that information? I suspect this is a similar situation with my 500 GB external drive I bought in college that my dad knocked onto the floor about the same distance only a week after I bought it and it was making a klacking noise like the head was slamming into something so I immediately powered it off. I ended up getting another of the same model the next day so I do have a working drive that would quite likely work as a parts drive. I can't get any of the specific make or model numbers right now since they are both hidden away in a storage room at the moment.

These hard drives are a pain, because I bought a few 5 TB drives to store my photos and one for my docs, but once you start adding more and more data, they stop working. It's as if we are going back to the days of record paying LP's/vinyls except, in a "miniature" form. How much do you charge for data recovery? thanks.

doesn't the phones speaker magnet interfere with the disk platter when you are tacking the photo? how sensitive are the disk? can a fridge magnet scramble the data ? pls reply

How could different sets of head not work? I mean they are all built the same or is it that there are minute micron differences that make the alignment or the patterns or such different so one head assembly would work and another not or is it something else involved?

I'd love to see some more about your work environment. Do you have just the flow hood? How do you manage the rest of your work space's clean requirements?

I just finished building a DIY 'clean room' cabinet to open up my 2.0TB WD20EARX hard drive that just stopped reading. I'm hoping the head just needs to be reparked. I'm 'going in' tomorrow... wish me luck.

Hi, I have the same series of hard drive of that video, but it is actually the 2 TB model, I had it for around 5 years and everything OK. I moved recently to an electrically unstable zone, and power outages are frequent. Along with my OS, I have HDD Sentinel which showed 100% health and performance besides the random outages when the computer was on, but yesterday after an outage, the health dropped to 31%, and it says they were 8 reallocated sectors out of nowhere, should I concern about the "142 days" of lifetime remaining? I have no important data, but is the drive I need to have my computer running good, I have some spare SATA2 HDD, but runs very slow and I cant buy another. Thanks in advance and good job

I accidentally started a storage space process on my HD. it formatted my drive. when I use recovery software to retrieve the files the files aren't useable. is the drive totally screwed or can it be recovered completely to the point the files work again?

Thanks for the vid, it's great. Just wondering 1. What do you do with drives that have FDE like FileVault or Bitlocker? Are they unreadable unless you can image the whole thing? (And have the password/RK of course) and 2. Do you get many failed SSDs coming through and how successful is the recovery process?

Hi. I suspect that I dropped my hard drive after attempting to plug it in many times receiving the same message of the hard drive not being recognized. I tried data recovery software, tried checking device manager, even tried to go to my local computer repair service that's a mile away from home (he didn't open the hard drive at all), etc. When plugged in, I don't hear any clicking noises or any similar noises like that. I haven't opened the hard drive yet due to fear of dust ruining it. I'm currently in Florida. Am I pretty much fucked? Also, how long does it take on average and what is the highest cost you charged for data recovery?

What amazes me is how fragile these things are. The drive literally only fell from 2-3 feet height on a carpeted floor. They should really build these things more sturdy.

You did an absolute great job of recovering the data but the worst scenario what could happen is if those platters are broken in pieces, in this case you have to puzzle those pieces together and then put them under an microscope, while extracting it,then align that data to other parts of the data were it belonges to, then use error correction to correct corrupted data , to recover and correct data as much as possible, then make backups of it on ssd and hdd drives to make sure it’s (tempuratury) save, But such process is extreamly difficuilt, time consumming and very $1000 expensive, but it’s worth it if you cannot life without that data.

My heads and platter have no visible damage, the platters would not spin until I reset the head, now the platter spins no problem, but the head will not move. What would be the next diagnosis? *note: Platter was checked and spins smoothly with no apparent off balance, wobble, or off center motion of any kind. Disk diagnostic tool can read or re-format/ write to disk.

You can see a vertical wobble in the dark shadow when you rotate the platters at 15:00... (dark shadow of the plate at the top left, hanging over the top platter). This a warped platter?

Curious about the software used. Look interesting. Is it custom?

Hi, found this very interesting. but also left my head in partition one way or another. how is it possible one pair of heads work better then the others.. arent they meant to perform exactly the same since they were manufactured in mass-production? i mean i really cant understand the difference in reliability. from the one set of heads to another assuming the head replacements were new/intact. could you enlighten me please? :) anyway thanks for the vid. greets

what recovery software are you using ?

Wow amazing, good video

thank you ! i want to kone the name of recovery tools ? can you tell me,thanks !

Just as I'm trying to archive stuff to Blu-ray discs right now, I have a question: So how much would a recovery by you that goes *exactly* like this one cost? (I'm not trying to say that there will be another one exactly like this, but telling me that would give me an idea of how much my bank account would need to worry if I ever needed this level of service.)

Which software are you used for hdd health checkup in this video?

What are recovery costs in relation to a new drive? Though some data/photos are priceless, cheers

I know - a RAID 5 is NOT a backup - but I have one with 5x 3T seagates (ST3000DM001) - and only had one failed (replaced by a ST3000DM008 as the original DM001 weren't available anymore) - and after rebuild of about 14h all data still there thanks to RAID ... also: seagates the only brand HDDs ever lasted over half a year - all other brands failed withing the first 6 months

I tried to take apart a drive like this and the metal casing was stuck like cement.

If a hard drive is not running, i.e. with parked heads, can it still get damaged by dropping?

what happen if i already open the hard drive case by myself?is it still can recovery or not?

What did you charge for this recovery?

Is it possible to recover data from a wd HDD that stopped working and is making beeping noise after a power outage?

Sorry for my English, it's not the native one and do not have subtitles in the video. . . Please inform which software is used from the 22:00 minute and what is its function? Thanks!

What does job like this run the customer? Pretty tough swap and a long case!

Do hdds with bigger capacities fail more often? Is a raid0 out of two old 500gb drives better than a brandnew 1000gb drive? I think the smaller the data on disk, the higher the risk of data loss. I would always prefer a raid 5 out of 4 500gb drives over a single 1.5tb drive!

I have an external toshiva hard drive with sata 3, but it does not let me recover data, which I deleted, I have already tried 5 data retrievers and none succeed

So what happens with the heads that were replaced? Do you put them back in the donor drive or throw them away (Since they are super sensitive)? Thanks!

Great video, my friend dropped her external WD hard drive. It reads and mounts in Linux but data transfer is very slow, about 1hr for a 1GB file. Have you seen this before? If so, do you have any recommendations?

hi my hard drive sounds it running ok but wont play on my sony smart tv it keeps asking me to register but i done this already before i started recording from the smart tv can anyone help me out please thanks very much.

mine both hdd opening wont. both inside xp have. recent 4 year since open cant im.

Out of curiosity - what is it about swapping in multiple separate heads in that makes it more successful? Is it the kind of thing where they are so intricate that the swapping process itself or individual characteristics of the heads affect things? Or is it that the scratches on the platter actually are high enough to hit and affect the heads?

Enterprise grade drives are built to be more durable than consumer grade drives, not from drops but from daily use. Do you get many of these drives sent in?

Hi acs and team I'm from Chennai india. Last week my Seagate desktop hdd 3tb is not detected which I purchased on 2015 november. Now the issue is header explained by technical person in Chennai. But he said to recover my files I need same hard disk with PN FW DOM all these three terms are really matters for recovering the files ... But you are keen with just serial number... First three Serial numbers enough to match up with other ?

What software is used?Great job