A case came into R3 data recovery early one morning with a story along the lines of "laptop dropped need emails ASAP" so we sprang into action.
The hard drive was removed from the laptop and opened in our cleanroom to find the top platter surface slightly scratched from the impact of hitting the floor but considering the urgency we decided to undertake a head swap and a donor was sourced from our stock.
The head swap went fine with no drama and the hard drive was moved onto our diagnostic machine and powered up for the first time…. After some calibration noises the hard drive decided to behave and the proprietary Firm Ware was backed up and the cloning process begun.
With all data recovery from the technically simple to the multiple head swaps, priority files are always important as a damaged hard drive may only have a short life after such an accident so focussing on these files maximises the results in these circumstances.
In this client's case the email file was cloned the best possible considering the scratches and late that night the finished email file was uploaded.