Platter with scratches. Can the manufacturer fix it?

[Imadeamistake]

Hi there. I have a Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB. One platter unfortunately has scratches and it kills heads, so data can't be pulled from there.
My question is, does the manufacturer (I know that they're not in the data recovery business) have machines that can make the surface of those platters smooth again so that heads won't break? Machines not available to the general public or data recovery businesses, for instance what about the glide and burnish machine?
Thank you.

 

[Jared]

Hi there. I have a Western Digital My Book Studio 2TB. One platter unfortunately has scratches and it kills heads, so data can't be pulled from there.
My question is, does the manufacturer (I know that they're not in the data recovery business) have machines that can make the surface of those platters smooth again so that heads won't break? Machines not available to the general public or data recovery businesses, for instance what about the glide and burnish machine?
Thank you.

There's one company out there advertising their use of a glide burnish machine to improve odds of data recovery. But, it's generally believed by most data recovery professionals that it's nothing more than some hyped up marketing that's unlikely to make any real world difference. If you can see damage on the platters, what you see is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. The data is most likely destroyed far beyond any hope of recovery.

Think of it like chipping paint on a mural. Once the chips fly off and become dust, there's really know way to know for sure what used to be there. Unfortunately, the mural that is your data is only in the 1/1,000,000th of a mm scale and needs each file to read 100% to have any chance to ever even decipher what the data was.

Even if you can get the surface smooth enough to not instantly destroy the read/write heads, it's unlikely that things like the servo tracking are going to even be intact enough to properly track and target sectors, correct for ecc, and calculate the checksum, etc. When any one of those processes fail, literally zero data is read from the drive.