Flood damaged hard drives are becoming much more prolific and knowing how to treat them is crucial to the oputcome of any data recovery attempt. Do NOT DRY the hard disk drive out. Although this may seem paradoxical - this will nearly always destroy the platter of the hard disk thus making your data irretrievable.

When hard disk drives get wet then dry out, there is nearly always a residue of contaminant left on the platters and heads. Any residue (including a piece of dust), causes physical degradation of the hard disk's platters and loses more data. DO keep the hard disk WET. Ideally, keep the hard disk drive in a sealed container to keep the hard disk drive wet. This stops the hard disk drive corroding and allows our technical staff to clean and dry the platters correctly with minimum damage to the platter surfaces.

A client approached us with a flood damaged hard drive after their house was overcome with river water. Thankfully the latop was not switched on at the time so there was no exasperating factors to consider. Our engineers were able to deconstruct the hard drive to access the platters and assembly. Using our specialised platter jig and an identical replacement hard drive, we were able to reassemble the hard drive with doner parts. Spinning the disk at a fraction of it's normal revolution, enabled us to image the raw data without crashing the disk, calculate the data parameters and rebuild all the data.