Clint Sharp writes:

together. I believe this may have instantly destroyed them, but I'm not
certain. It seems like I need some kind of "comb" type thing to keep the heads
separated while off the platters. Anyone have any bright ideas?
Ummm, a comb? We used to call it a spragging tool but I'm not sure if
that's even a word, let alone one that's commonly used to describe the
tool. We made them out of perspex strips with a lot of care, you need to
be very careful with such a tool as the arms the heads are mounted on
are extremely delicate and any distortion will cause an instant crash.

For the record, another fellow suggested Post-It notes arranged in a particular
fashion.

Final words, if the data is important, send it for data recovery, you're
not going to get it back and risk destroying all hope of anyone getting
it back. If you're doing this for the experience, go for it, if you're
doing it to gain a drive, then go out and buy one, you'd never be able
to trust it with any data you wanted to keep.

Oh, it's not a big deal. Basically, the drive housed my /usr partition and I
was caught without a backup when it happened. I can rebuild everything except
/usr/local and /usr/tmp. The former contains several years worth of admin
scripts and other tidbits, and the latter contained open source code I was
working on. Neither is a catastrophic loss by any means, but I would very
much like to have them back - they just aren't worth as much as $500 is worth
to me right now. Hence my casual approach to this issue.