[plug] [OT] Harddrive surgery

[Gavin Chester]

On Sun, 2008-05-18 at 11:35 +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> Hi guys,
>  
> Long time since my last post. I'm wanting to tap your brains a bit and
> gather some information, links and advice about about harddrive
> surgery.
> I'd like to learn how to repair drives. Mainly along the lines of
> moving platters, fixing or replacing heads or changing curcuit
> boards. 


I attempted this once and in part ignorance had no success. The article
you link to is full of the needed information, but unless the drives he 
tackled were built radically differently to the drive I tackled, 
the author glosses over the pitfalls. 

Getting torx bits to dismantle the drive is cheap and easy.
Getting a drive open is also easy. Alternatively, swapping a controller
board is the easiest of all. You get the picture.

But once inside the drive case you are faced with a VERY strong magnet,
very flimsy drive heads and very scratchable platters. The drive I 
tried had bad heads. I could not budge platters on the spindle, so instead 
tried putting newer heads in without removing the platters. It just didn't
feel like I was doing it without damage, and it was VERY hard to do 
while fighting the strong magnet used to control the heads.

Then, when reassembled I got the drive to work but only with a whole host
of seek errors. It was a different drive all right but still unusable
and I had to give up on recovering the data. Your mileage may and should
vary, but don't expect it to be easy until you have had a lot of sacrificial 
drives to practice on.

(BTW: I know a place you should find a lot of low-capacity drives thrown
in a skip left on the street for collection. Contact me off list for address)

HTH

Gavin