Question Help! Recovery possible??

[hopeful333]

Long and very frustrating story… In short my late father whom passed away unexpectedly three years ago was a private accountant. He had dozens of clients and assisted with their personal finances. After his passing, we sold his laptop after removing the hard drive and threw his hard drive in a bin with our other old stored drives. Then about a year ago when spring cleaning, I disposed of (what I thought) was the old drive from his accounting laptop, only to just recently realize it was actually another old drive that was from our old desktop PC that has very,very valuable family photos on it spanning several years that we’ve been meaning to transfer over but never got around to.

In thinking it was my father’s old accounting drive with the finance records of dozens and dozens of his old clients, I tried to make sure nobody could retrieve data on it before disposing, so I did the following (I’m now praying there is a way, somehow, to retrieve data from this drive as it has invaluable family photos and memories and am willing to pay possibly whatever is necessary)…

***For reference, the drive is from a 2004 or 2005 Compaq presario pc with I believe a 200gb drive. Single platter drive. Not sure of exact drive make or model of the drive, I’ve heard possibly western digital but again, this is just a guess. Perhaps someone on here knows what the drive likely was given the computer make/model/year..

-I removed the drive and unscrewed the drive to access the lone, aluminum platter and removed the platter. I used a basic hand held hammer and hammered the top side the platter , while the platter laid on a wooden surface. I probably struck it 10 times at least and possibly upwards of 15+ hits, all to the top side of the platter,if that matters.

It’s aluminum so it obviously didn’t shatter, but in the end, there were a few areas of noticeable bending of the platter, mainly around a few of the edge areas of the platter if I recall correctly, to the point where it’s no longer perfectly flat, and there are more than a few tiny dents across portions of the platter on the struck surface/top side. Thinking back, since it’s been about a year now, I can’t remember exactly what the damage looked like so I’m trying my best to describe. It could be a little better or worse than that description. Finally, after this hammering, having OCD like I do and not wanting it to be sitting in a landfill for some lowlife to discover and try to recover, I disposed of the platter in my backyard pond and threw the drive casing in separately as well. The pond is freshwater and fairly shallow but probably has mud on the bottom where the platter sank to. It’s been in there for roughly 7 months. I can retrieve the platter and drive of course, but before I do, I need to know how to handle it so I don’t make damage even worse.

My questions are:

1) is recovery possible?(Again I’m willing to spend a lot and possibly whatever it takes)

2) I know scratches are bad for platters,but is my case more hopeful since it’s seemingly smaller/tiny dents and not traditional scratches? Or is this worse?

3)does it being a single platter drive help or hurt recovery chances? Also I *think* I only hammered one side/the top side,if this matters as well

4)is the bending correctable? Seems like it would be possibly able to be flattened but I have no idea. Again, the bending may have been around a few of the edge areas of the platter

5)Does the pond submersion not matter/not negatively affect recovery chances? I read water has essentially no ill effects on data recovery from hdd drives as data is stored magnetically and water has no adverse effects to that. But I guess that’s also assuming a platter with no prior damage unlike mine that has several tiny dents and some bending before submerssion. Again, it’s only freshwater, but the platter has been in there for 7/8 months and possibly lying on a muddy ground at the bottom.

6)price range of such recovery and your professional opinion on odds of recovery if willing to spend a lot.

Thank you so much for reading and any advice, apologies for the long post but I’ve been a wreck lately and beating myself up for mistakingly damaging the wrong drive and now possibly loosing so many invaluable family photos and memories. Even more mad at myself for not backing up the data years ago. Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[mikeymikec]

IIRC a pro company will charge a fee to look, and if you're willing to gamble that then go for it.

I personally think the hammer strikes are what will have destroyed any chance of recovery at the very least in the areas that have been struck because what on earth is going to read the data off a surface that isn't flat, but also AFAIK hammering metal upsets its magnetic field.

 

[daveybrat]

I've sent many bad drives in for recovery over my 28 years of IT and the only ones that couldn't be recovered had scored platters (scratches on it).

After what you've done i would say the odds of recovery are about as close to 0% as you can get.

 

[hopeful333]

Thanks for the replies so far. Really appreciated.

However, I did want to point a few things out. After doing some digging (trying to hold out for any hope), I came across a few interesting reads regarding recovery. I'll provide the links and relevant quotes from each article.......

1) https://www.popularmechanics.com/te...66/how-to-read-a-smashed-hard-drive-14877558/

"Yes, physically destroying a hard drive renders your device and the data on it unusable. But with enough motivation and the right equipment—some of your data can be recovered. Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist of security firm DKH, says 100 percent physical data destruction is nearly impossible. The only method that comes close is overwriting the disk. (Kaminsky is not involved with the Newtown case.)

"Within a hard drive, there are several square feet of [read/write] surface, and any given file takes up less than a square millimeter," Kaminsky says. "That means even if the drive is dented or shattered into tiny pieces, the actual surface that contains the data is still there and readable."

"This kind of complicated restoration is very different than what pros would do to rescue data from a crashed drive. In that case, the drive's read head has usually stopped working and the disk has stopped spinning. Recovery engineers remove the disk, which is stored on a platter, and put it on a larger, dedicated reader.In the Newtown case, the physical integrity of the platter itself is suspect. The severity of damage is not yet known, but if investigators are lucky Lanza may have only used enough force to stop the disk from spinning, rendering it silent but only dented. Data on dented plates can be accessed much quicker than data on shattered drives."

2) Can evidence be salvaged from Adam Lanza's damaged computer? | 6abc Philadelphia | 6abc.com

"If these platters are intact law enforcement can read data from those platters," Eric Friedberg of Stroz/ Friedberg said.He said even if hardware and electronics are damaged, data can be retrieved.
Friedberg is a reknowned computer forensic crime expert. His company Stroz/Friedberg has retrieved information from damaged hard drives in big criminal cases and in terrorism investigations. His firm is not involved in this investigation. However, Friedberg says even if reports are true that Lanza took a hammer or screw driver to his discs, retrieval of some information is still possible: "Still theoretically possible to get information off that disc, so may not get a whole file or whole email but partial email," Friedberg said."

3) https://www.inquisitr.com/adam-lanzas-hard-drive-data-might-be-recoverable-op-ed

Popular Mechanics ran a test of their own to see what level of damage a platter-based hard drive can take and still have the data be recoverable:

“First, we took two laptop drives, loaded them with test movie and music files, then beat the heck out of them until we heard the signature clicking of mechanical hard-drive failure. Then we submerged one of the drives in custom- made storm-surge floodwaters (salt water, construction debris, oil) and let it soak for four days.
We sent both hard drives to Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery, which sells data-rescue services to both corporate clients and consumers. Ontrack’s Jeff Pederson analyzed the drives in the company’s clean room and found that the read/write heads in our dry drive were bent from our abuse and that we had scratched the platters. Our flooded drive was wet, but the platters were undamaged. Pederson replaced the heads and performed a recovery.
The results? Pederson was able to save 99 percent of the data from the dry drive and 100 percent from the flooded drive.”

4) Connecticut shooter's smashed hard drive poses challenge for investigators

"Tony Martino, Director of the Computer Forensics Research and Development Center at Utica College, clarified that while a whole shattered platter makes chances of recovery "pretty much nonexistent," it may be possible to read a portion of the data if just a piece of the platter is damaged. Even then, the recovery process is quite intense.

Paulo Licio de Geus, associate professor at Institute of Computing at Unicamp, focuses his research on computer security. He explains that if the platters are merely bent, rather than shattered — which could happen, depending on materials and manufacturers — an elaborate laboratory procedure could be used to recover some information.

Chris Bross is a senior engineer at Drive Savers — a company which tries to recover data from erased or damaged hard drives. He told NBC News that in his two decades on the job, he has successfully extracted information from hard drives damaged intentionally by being hit with a hammer, shot or run over with a car.

"It's actually difficult to successfully destroy data to an absolute level," he explains. "What we do in a laboratory is engineering work. There's always opportunity for recovery from a storage device unless that device has been extremely damaged." He confirms that, "if the platters have been shattered, then there's no tangible way to put together data from that." But if the platters are partially chipped, scratched, or similar? There's still a chance."

5) https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech... process takes,wipes and destroys hard drives.

"We’ve seen people try to drill holes in their hard drives, but you can get a lot if data back from damaged platters. Obviously not where the holes were, but everywhere else,” he said.
Depending on what Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Rizwan did to their electronics, it's very possible much could be retrieved from them, say experts.

“The forensic techniques available today are remarkably advanced, from recovering ghost images to reading minuscule fragments of disk platters. Any given file occupies less than .0015 square inche, so even small fragments can be read with advanced equipment. Chemical destruction would get the job done, but it is not very practical,” Gunn said.

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What do you guys think about all of this? Sorry for the longer post and again thanks for all replies so far. You guys know far more than I on the issue.... Just trying to keep an open mind to this and explore any possibilities I can. Again, I'm willing to spend a large amount of money if this is possible. Thanks again