Dropped drives & scratched platters
A fall can misalign the heads or even scratch the platters. The longer the drive spins, the worse it gets. We assess and intervene in our cleanroom.
After a drop, time works against you
When a hard drive is dropped or knocked, the heads can strike the platter surface. If you power it on, the damaged heads plough through the magnetic layer and create irreversible concentric scratches. This is the number one cause of permanent loss.
Not every case is lost: very often only the heads are affected and the platters remain readable. The only way to know without making things worse is a cleanroom opening by a specialist — not a "let’s just plug it in" attempt.
Our method, step by step
Cleanroom inspection
We open the drive under laminar flow to visually inspect the platters and heads, and determine whether the platters are scratched or only the heads are damaged.
Head replacement
If the platters are intact, we graft a compatible donor head stack and proceed to read the drive.
Scratched-platter cases
With scratches, we read the still-intact zones by bypassing the destroyed sectors, using fresh heads and an adapted read strategy to limit wear.
Imaging and reconstruction
We create a disk image, rebuild the file system and recover the accessible files, with an honest report on what is recoverable.
Our equipment
AceLab PC-3000
PC-3000 UDMA, Flash and Portable PRO — direct disk access bypassing the OS, service-area and firmware access.
ISO 5 cleanroom
Opening drives and swapping heads dust-free (Class ISO 5), without contaminating the platters.
Micro-soldering
Micro-soldering stations to restore damaged controller boards, ROM chips and logic circuits.
Why trust us with a dropped drive
A dropped drive is a mechanical emergency: every power-on can turn a simple head problem into permanently unreadable scratched platters. We open it in an ISO 5 cleanroom in Brussels, in-house, to freeze its state before it worsens.
You speak directly to the engineer handling your drive, since 2012. Free diagnosis, firm quote, and No Cure, No Pay: if we recover nothing, you pay nothing.
Frequently asked questions
My drive was dropped and is no longer detected — what now?
Do not power it on and do not shake it. Unplugging it and bringing it to us is the best protection: repeated starts can scratch the platters and make recovery impossible.
Do scratched platters mean lost data?
Not always. A localized scratch destroys one zone, but the rest of the platters may stay readable. We recover the intact zones; the free diagnosis tells you what is realistic.
Does the "freezer trick" work?
No, it is a dangerous myth. Condensation inside the drive damages the magnetic surface. Do not try any home remedy on a drive that suffered an impact.
Dropped drive? Bring it in powered off — we examine it for free.
Free diagnosis · Firm quote before any work · No Cure, No Pay