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IBM Deskstar Data Recovery The IBM Deskstar series of drives were considered state of the art, with glass platters and high speed they beat the competition and were the hard disk of choice. Then the problems started happening, all of a sudden the drives would freeze and make the occasional click sound. IBM brought out a piece of software that would 'repair' the problem and bring the drive back to life.

In order to fix the drive, the software had to overwrite the entire drive so as to fix the problems. So data recovery was the only option if the data was needed before running in the repair.

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Drives beyond recovery

In some cases the drives had suffered a catastrophic failure and was so bad that in many cases data recovery was impossible.

Because the platters were made of glass, tiny imperfections resulted with complete media removal from the platters, leaving only the glass substrate - which in many cases had carried on through all platters

What happens is that as the first piece of coating is removed from the platter, it becomes airborne, lands elsewhere on the platters and causes another head crash. As more and more debris is released into the drive the problem soon becomes totally catastrophic with little or no magnetic media remaining on the platters.