If you have an old hard drive from a PC or Mac, there is a good chance you can recover the files and data on the drive. You ...

Taking the basic steps—deleting data from or reformatting a computer hard drive, or doing a factory ... you'll have to again enter your PIN or password to get back into Android.

Hard drive failures ... to avoid ripping the heads off entirely. With this done, the drive is reassembled and powered up. Amazingly, the repair is successful, and data is able to be recovered!