Ken writes:

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.

That's possible, but the drive doesn't even come online. It would attempt to
read the boot sector at the point when the BIOS passes control to the boot
sector, not when the drive has just spun up.

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.

I think we are just confusing the 'firmware area' with 'boot sector'.

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.

Well, I wasn't planning on removing any of the platters since that just
sounds like a disaster in the making. So hopefully this won't be an
issue.