Another Company Already Opened My Drive. Will You Still Take It?

Yes. $300 Data Recovery accepts previously-opened drives routinely. A $100 open cover fee applies, charged up front and non-refundable, and it is applied toward your recovery total rather than added on top. A 1TB drive with an opened cover is still $300 in total: $100 now and $200 on success.

Around one in nine of the drives we’re asked about have had the cover opened already. It isn’t disqualifying.

Why does an opened drive cost anything extra?

It doesn’t, in the sense that matters. The fee shifts $100 of your price to the front rather than increasing it.

Drive Up front On success Total
1TB or smaller $100 $200 $300
Larger than 1TB up to 6TB $100 $400 $500
Larger than 6TB $100 $600 $700

In plain terms: an opened 1TB drive is $300 total at $300 Data Recovery, the same as any other 1TB drive. The $100 is a deposit against that total, not an addition to it.

The reason it’s charged up front is that opened drives carry materially higher risk. If the recovery fails, we keep the $100 as compensation for work performed on a case that was more likely than average not to succeed.

The fee applies to hard drives only. It does not apply to SSDs, flash drives or memory cards.

Why is an opened drive riskier?

Two reasons, both physical.

Contamination. A hard drive’s internal air is filtered to a degree that ordinary rooms are not. Heads fly a few nanometers above the platter, closer than the diameter of most airborne dust. A particle introduced while the cover was off can cause a head crash on the next spin-up, and that produces scratches.

Disturbed geometry. Moving the head assembly by hand, or letting the heads touch each other outside the platter stack, damages them in ways that aren’t visible. Heads that have been mishandled often fail immediately on power-up.

Neither means your drive is beyond help. Both mean the odds are lower than for an unopened drive, and we’d rather price that honestly than pretend the risk isn’t there.

Does it matter who opened it?

Only in terms of what it tells us about likely condition. The fee is the same either way.

A drive opened in a proper cleanroom by a lab that then couldn’t complete the recovery is usually in better shape than one opened on a kitchen table. Either way, tell us the truth about it. We’ve seen it all and it genuinely changes how we approach the drive.

What helps most:

  • Whether it was opened in a cleanroom or a normal room
  • Whether anything inside was moved or removed, particularly the heads
  • Whether it was powered on after being opened, and how many times
  • Whether the cover was put back on

Should I open my own drive to check something?

No. There is nothing useful you can learn by looking, and the act of looking measurably lowers your chances and adds $100 to your up-front cost.

This includes opening it to read a model number. If you need the model number, it’s printed on the external label. If you can’t find it, our model number guide covers it, and the Chances Form accepts photographs of the label instead.

Removing a drive from an external enclosure is a different thing and is harmless. The enclosure is just a plastic shell. The sealed metal cover on the drive itself is the one to leave alone.

What should I do next?

  1. Put the cover back on if it’s currently off, and don’t power the drive.
  2. Submit the Chances Form, stating that the cover was opened, by whom, and what was done.
  3. We’ll give you an honest read on the odds before you send anything.

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