MUST SEE! Hard Drive Extreme Fire Damage 

Hot Swappable ?

Probably not lol

Lol

Yeah, I think this one is above our skill set. lol

If real life was like CSI they would just click the enhance button and retrieve the data flawlessly, LOL

t0nito Using their special microscope to virtual reality, where everything is 3d.

Exactly LOL, they would be able to read the data optically bit by bit with that microscope! hahaha

Love this comment thread !

Right on! haha

kako je druze

if that would work then can you explain it catching on cold and never building because of the burnt as prouder

will not work if there is permanent damage

Yeah that was the worst I've seen, and we've done a LOT of fire damaged hard drives over the years. Nothing like this at all.

Haha, that's exactly what it's like. We are thinking of putting it in a small glass shadow box and hang it on the wall.

Ismoyo Nugroho Tomo hahaha you are right

It sounds like the heads have failed unfortunately.

I actually had a very similar thing happen to an off-brand laptop hard drive (my mother's) a few years ago and it ended up that there was bug in the drive's firmware which would cause the legacy BIOS (did not even detect in UEFI) to detect the drive as being part of RAID array even though it never had been, not to mention why would a basic laptop even have RAID support to begin with. So I tried pairing it with a similar drive in RAID 0 (using a RAID diagnostics and recovery USB tool to prevent loss of data) and got it to work just barely well enough that I was able to copy the data to a different drive using the Command Line (Command Prompt) as Windows explorer was not listing the files. All the files from the drive were recovered intact and uncorrupted but man what a weird situation, I wish name brand pre-built PC and laptops had better quality Hard Drives build into them, it would save me a lot of headaches. Though that story is just the tip of the iceberg the sheer number of times members of my family have dropped laptops (and just had their hard drives die or almost die randomly) and experience catastrophic hard drive issues is staggering, I wish I could just buy them all military-grade tough books. I think we've gone through at least 7 or 8 2.5 SATA III HDDs in just the last 5 years. I don't know if you can tell yet but I'm the computer guy in my family, if I can't fix it nobody can. LOL.

you can fix it but be very very careful when you open it up

The heads were most likely damaged when the drive was dropped. If the files are not yours, and they are absolutely critical, I would not do anything more with it. With those particular Western Digital drives, it's very common for the sliders to become dislodged (sliders are what allow the heads to float above the platter surface), and in many cases they will eventually just fall off and the heads will then contact the platter surface. If that happens, it's very easy for the platter to become damaged. So really it just comes down to placing a value on the data. If the data is really crucial, then you should talk to a company that can actually help you. If it's not our company there are plenty of other good ones like Drivesavers, Ontrack, DTI and others.

It's rare that platters are this severely damaged...at least on the jobs we receive. We may see smoke and water (extinguishing fluids) contamination, but that can be cleaned up.

Same.

The platter is made of aluminum with magnetic particles in it so like 650o celcius. Aluminum looks ashy as it oxidises really fast when its melted

Based on the controller board it is.

That's actually what we are doing. We are even getting a shadow box for it lol

No