What happens to the media surfaces of a dropped drive? If you are old enough to remember vinyl music records, you can visualize the needle being forcefully moved across the record surface and making a deep non-concentric groove, which often rendered that record unusable. For the younger reader, think about a CD or DVD that made contact with a rough surface or is badly scratched and will not play anymore. Similarly to the playback-head of a record player, the force of a dropped drive will cause the READ/WRITE heads to move across the platters and make several damaging contacts with the media surfaces. The contact will typically dislodge a sizeable amount of the magnetic material, which will then be dragged along with the moving READ/WRITE heads, causing further damage. You would be amazed how quickly the disk surfaces will deteriorate to a dusty-mess. That is why we suggested in our first blog post on this subject to PULL-THE-PLUG!!
Because the damage is mostly to the media, there is absolutely nothing that a non-data-recovery-lab engineer can do. An inexperienced attempt by anyone else, will only make things worse!
Next posting we will cover, what happens to a dropped drive which was not-powered at the time of the trauma.