"Ryan Underwood" wrote in message
...
Hello.

I have a click-of-death 4-platter Maxtor drive. It failed clicky while
running. So I believe that this is not a firmware issue or an issue with
the
hidden data on the drive, nor simply due to bad sectors. By process of
elimination, it seems to be either the electronics, the heads or the head
amplifier. I obtained an identical drive and swapped the board, which did
not
change things. So now I am thinking about trying to replace the head
assembly.

snip

As others have pointed out, this is not possible to do at home, period.

For starters, a hard drive must never be opened in anything other than a
special clean room because a speck of dust landing on the platters will
cause a head crash which will destroy the surface integrity of both heads
and platters.

Secondly, dismantling the mechanism will severely damage the heads and
platters, special tools and jigs will be required to accomplish this- there
is no room for error.

Thirdly, even assuming one managed to physically transplant a new mechanism,
the drive will never read or write data again because of the contamination
of the previously sealed drive and the alignment of the mechanism.

The drive is now junk, you'll have to forget about the data on it I'm
afraid.

Dave