Physical data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data is being salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid state drives (SSD), USB flash, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. 

Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system.