After data is retrieved from a hard drive, is it reassembled to once again become a working drive?

Typically all source media is returned in the same condition as it arrived. Our objective is to get the drive functioning just long enough for us to acquire an image from it, not to repair the drive for future use.

Reassembling the failed source drive is part of the recovery process, but we would never recommend that a customer use that drive again after data has been recovered from it. Source drives are returned to their original state with their original parts and sent back to the customer as “nonfunctional”.

In the case of a logical recovery, however, the drive does not have to be opened and can be reformatted for future use.