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Used to work on disk drives many years ago when they had up to 14 platters, magnetic heads and removable platters. A scratch just seems odd to me. Are they saying the head came in contact with the platter and scratched the surface ? We used to call that a head crash. The magnetic head is supposed to fly above the platter and just sense changes in the magnetic fields in the platter (ie - the data).

We never really worried about scratches, since it was difficult to get anything besides the head in between the platters. And you never put anything but a head in their. Granted if you screwed up installing a head, you could scratch the platter a little bit I guess, but that was why you did not got to work drunk.

And these devices are/were magnetic. So a scratch wont affect them as a scratch would affect an optical device such as a cd. Or even a mechanical device such as an old audio record. Unless the scratch was deep enough to remove the magnetic storage material.

Scratch was not a terminology we used much back in the day. Just a head crash was what we called it. And the platter would have been destroyed back then. And these devices back then had removable platters. That way you could move disk media around.