Electrum isn't a hardware wallet? If I damage my hard drive and lose the backup of my electrum wallet, then I can no access the information from it. As Electrum has no central servers to store the data on it.
Are you thinking of the hardware parts of electrum? If so, then you can definitely restore from them by just plugging them into your computer and putting in the pass code. But the regular version of electrum does not have this.
It's just an executable written in python.
https://electrum.org/#downloadHave I compiled my electrum wallet wrong then? If I try to recover it from anything by my recovery drive then it always creates a fresh wallet (although whether that's a security thing or not i'm not sure).
HD doesn't stand for hardware... it stands for "Heirachical Deterministic":
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deterministic_wallet#Type_2_hierarchical_deterministic_walletBasically, you have a seed which acts as a starting point and ALL your wallet addresses are generated from this starting point in a known, repeatable way... so should your computer be completely destroyed, you simply load up Electrum on a new PC, "restore" -> "I have a seed" -> put in your seed words and the wallet will recreate exactly the same addresses and thus rebuild your wallet from the data already in the blockchain

So did you try all those ?? and what is the result. hierarchical Deterministic
There are some script looking for partial keys or dat files on damaged HardDrives.