Hardware

To move the discs from one place to another you need a near vacuum environment with micro clean air, static free and without any magnetising fields. If you can find such environment, work away.

If you try to open the box you will corrupt all the data on the disks as it is stored under varying magnetic fields, the box serves as shield of sort. If it is removed the data will immediately become corrupt.

I?m afraid if the discs are bent and touching there is no way of getting the data back but if the disks aren?t touching under no circumstance take them apart as this will result in complete data loss.

The only thing you can do is get as much data as possible of it in the current state you have it in.

Hope fully that helped

Before you take it apart try putting the hard drive in the freezer for a couple of hours. Sometimes it helps some times it doesn't.

Good Luck

If the case is dented, and you are hearing a grinding noise -- you are going to destroy any chance of getting data back from forensics. Physical damage to the platters (like heads grinding on them) will cause unrecoverable damage.

If the data is not important -- go ahead and try to get data back. If it IS important, send it to a drive recovery specialist -- they have the proper environment and knowledge to disassemble the drive and get the data back (if it is not destroyed aleady).

The platters themselves will shatter before bending much as well. They do not take pressure well. Once shattered, there is 0 chance of recovery.

put a fork in that drive, it's done.

In order to be able to read any data, the drive must initialize.

To initialize, it must be able to come up to speed and read the servo-tracks on the disk.

The servo-track data must match the data stored on the disk controller when it was manufactured...this means you cannot swap the controller circuit board between drives, or swap physical platters into a different drive.

The show-stopper is that data is not arranged serially on the disk...the drive does not fill up platter 1, then goto platter2. If it did, then, in theory, you could recover half the data.

The data, and the servo tracks, are distributed across multiple platters. The hard drive is a 'random access device'.

http://www.cf-intl.com/evidence_recovery_basics.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

Technically, if your life depended upon it, a data recovery expert could re-create the file allocation table by-hand and read each bit of the drive platters by-hand. This would be an expensive and thankless task.

is the result of the drive seeking the servo-tracks as part of the init process.

If a platter is bent, and there are grinding noises, there's a better chance of David Beckham becoming King of England that that drive initializing.

In the olden days you could swap drive controllers between drives, but modern drive technology 'marries' the servo-track data to the drive controller. At this point I would start contacting data recovery specialists.

The servo tracks and data tracks are distributed randomly across all platters/surfaces, so an undamaged platter2 or platter3 cannot be recovered, as the drive must initialize to read the data and make sense of what bits belong to which files.