The heads in an old hard drive has stopped working, as in, they click. I've tried the freezer trick and all that. My last resort is to take apart the drive and replace the head assembly with one that works and run a data recovery application to retrieve any information that hasn't been ruined from damage.

Would this be possible? What sort of metrics would I have to match? RPM, Manufacturer? That is, if the RPM of the disk affects how the heads move over it. If no one really knows, I think I'll continue anyways and see how it goes. I don't really need anything on the drives, but it'd be amazing to have my photo portfolio from school back. It's a double headed sword for me, though. I have a school portfolio on one and documents I need on the other but not "I'll-pay-2k-to-have-it-professionally-recovered" important.

Any feedback? Opinions?

The second you open the case, you've contaminated it: the heads spin about 30 atoms above the platter, so even smoke particles are larger than the distance between the head and the platter. Fingerprints are too tall as well. Basically, unless you want to make yourself a mini-clean room, then it's infeasible.

Yep, your hard drive is a paperweight. I'm sorry you lost all your files, especially that school portfolio of yours.

In the meantime, the hard drive platters make excellent mirrors for playing with lasers. We've taken apart two hard drives, and I'm fiddling with the platters right now!

EDIT: And on the topic of lasers, you can also fill your room with smoke by boiling glycerin. It's sensitive enough to show the laser beam, yet doesn't set smoke detectors off.

If you really want to get your data back, pay some professionals to do it. As Kerm said, a hard drive is such a precision device that you cannot expect to keep it in working order if you attempt to service it yourself.

I'm sure you can find plenty of companies that will do it with a bit of googling, but it might be pretty expensive. An example I know of offhand, Seagate have such a service.

This is also a good lesson: keep backups.

As has been mentioned twice, but should still be reiterated: If you need to replace any components inside the casing, you're screwed.

Replacing the drive controller (external circuitry) is sometimes possible, so that might be worth looking into, depending on the symptoms of your problem.

Not *entirely* true, just a close. It was actually somewhat popular back in the day to add a window to your hdd using your bathroom as a make shift clean room: http://www.overclockers.com/hard-drive-window/

But of course that doesn't come anywhere close to trying to replace the head, which yeah - that one's pretty much not going to happen.

Cool article, Kllrnohj; maybe I'll be bored enough to try that on one of my 500GB drives one day when it's no longer doing anything mission-critical. Also, I ironically ran across an article yesterday on exactly what not to do when a drive fails when one of my 2TB drives failed:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/276212-32-need-dead-wd20ears-0mvwb0

I guess the only thing I can do is hold on to the drives for years to come and hope the price of the service drops too.

iirc the success vs. bricked ratio started to lean heavily towards the "bricked" side of things when capacities started exceeding 40-80gb. So you'll probably brick it, but good luck if you decide to attempt it.



Won't happen as it's a delicate service that involves manual labor and expensive equipment. There's no "mass market scaling" factor to allow for price drops.


But here's the guide you were looking for originally: http://hddguru.com/articles/2006.02.17-Changing-headstack-Q-and-A/

That's no where near the simplicity I was thinking. It was all as I expected until the last part where the author had to manually tweak the head gradient to get any data.

Update: I went to the website of the software I bought and found out they do in-house drive rescue as well. It starts at $500 though, but since I bought their software I also get $100 off. Might send in one drive next year. It's the cheapest price I've seen but do know the cost can escalate into the 1.2k range and beyond.

Will likely by a drive from them as well, maybe when I send it in next summer - hopefully - drives will be a few bucks cheaper.