It is not uncommon for us to get Western Digital Blue hard drives in for data recovery where one or both heads are completely destroyed. The chances of recovery tend to be determined by how much damaged was caused by the broken heads scraping against the platter surfaces while both the end user and/or their technician make their own recovery attempts. Fortunately, these drives seem to be fairly resilient and we are able to recover the data from them, most of the time.
In the most recent case, pictured above, we have a WD5000AAKX-603CA0 with two completely damaged heads. After changing the heads, the drive was making some noises, letting us know that it was not going to give up the client data without a fight. Damage within the file tables (MFT), resulted in the key target folders not being readily available. This forced us to completely image all the sectors on the drive where data files are stored, skipping the areas with media damage and gradually getting the number of unread sectors down to the smallest amount possible. From there, we had to run a full file system scan using a few different data recovery programs, each getting slightly different results in file structure. The client was presented with a file listing showing all the recovery results and they reported back that everything that they were looking for was recovered.