This depends on how you define “broken”. If the hard drive is completely unusable—to the point where the computer can’t see it, period—then no, Selkie cannot.
However, we’ve seen situations where a hard drive cannot boot properly and is beginning to make a whining sound, suggesting the internal mechanics of the drive (such as the motor and bearings) have begun to fail. In this case, Selkie can sometimes recover the files because it places a very light load on the computer and the drive. We’ve had customers who have literally recovered their files with Selkie, attempted to restart the computer one last time, and had the hard drive die completely as the installed version of Windows attempted to boot up.
In the vast majority of cases, though, a “broken” drive isn’t really broken; instead, the operating system has become corrupted and won’t boot. In this case, the data on the drive is intact. Selkie will have no problem at all recovering files in this case.
Regards;
Jonathan Lyster, CTO
Tugboat Enterprises
