Unfortunately, most physical damage cannot be repaired by users and needs to taken to a professional. Users normally do not have the hardware or expertise needed to make these repairs. Often data recovery companies are employed to save important data and the cost can be high. These companies will use sterile facilities to assure the media is protected during repairs.

The need to recover lost data from hardware suffering physically damaged can involve many techniques.  Damages can be repaired by replacing parts in the hard disk. This may make the disk usable; however there could still be logical damage.

If the media has suffered a major electric failure it will require the need to recover lost data in order to salvage its contents.

Consider checking your warranty, many procedures can and will void your warranty, resulting in a failure to recover lost data from a hard disk drive.

Extracted images may be used to rebuild data after any logical damage has been repaired. After this has been completed files can be in usable form although recovery is often incomplete.

There are open source tools such as HDClone and DCFLdd that can recover data from all but the physically damaged sectors. A 2007 Defense Cyber Crime Institute study shows that the DCFLdd v1.3.4-1 installed on a Linux 2.4 Kernel system produces extra “bad sectors”, resulting in the loss of information that is actually available. The study states that when installed on a FreeBSD Kernel system, only the bad sectors are lost.

Hard Disk Drive data recovery has the following abilities:

• Bypassing the BIOS and operating system which are very limited in their abilities to deal with drives that have “bad sectors” or take a long time to read
• Reading data from “bad sectors” rather than skipping them (by using various read commands and ECC to recreate damaged data)
• Handling issues caused by unstable drives, such as resetting/repowering the drive when it stops responding or skipping sectors that take too long to read (read instability can be caused by minute mechanical wear and other issues).
• Pre-configuring drives by disabling certain features, such a SMART and G-List re-mapping, to minimize imaging time and the possibility of further drive degradation.