Ryan Underwood wrote:
Ken writes:


I agree with the other posters, but there is the freezer technique that
I would try before giving up if there is data you wish to recover. I
trust you know what I am referring to??? My guess is that it is the
disk that is more likely to be your problem, rather than the heads. If
that is true, your head swap effort would be for naught even if you were
successful, and that is unlikely.


I would like to know why you think the disk is the problem. As I said, it
failed while transferring data, and never again did anything but click. Were
it a media defect at the particular location, it should still come online and
fail when accessing that area. Were it a defect in the firmware storage areas,
it should not have failed while running, but at bootup.

First off, I am NOT jumping on you for anything. I just want to make
that clear. That being said, I have messed with HDs when they were no
longer functional and needed, just to see if anything could be done with
them. Most failures I have encountered with the clicking noise were due
to what I think is a failure to read the boot sector.

It has been useful to do the freeze process in both the boot sector and
data sector failures so that information can be retrieved, but you have
limited chances at this. If the only the logic was needed for a HD to
be recognized, then it should be possible to boot from only the logic
board without the disk attached. I do not think this is possible,
because it takes a reading of the boot sector for the drive to be
recognized.

There is another feature to consider when you physically change the
platters. If there is more than one disk, I believe interleave still
takes place. I may be wrong about this, but it still might be a
consideration in how you install the platters if you are able to read
them with different heads.


I think it's funny how everyone jumped on me for not being in class 100 clean
room. Unlike apparently everyone here, I have opened and run hard drives
both without the cover and with the cover replaced, and they do not instantly
crash. Yes, they probably do eventually crash (at least one did after several
days), but that's not what I'm worried about. The head to platter alignment
issue bothers me more, since there are 4 platters and I presume 8 heads (I
haven't opened this drive yet). Unless the heads are precisely aligned with
each other at manufacturing time ensuring that every set of heads is identical
(or at least identical enough for our purposes), a disk format with one set of
heads will be unreadable by another set due to differing physical displacement
between the heads.