Jules wrote
Rod Speed wrote
kip wrote

Which clean room will you be using ?

He's gunna need a hell of a lot more than a clean room.

Actually, it's an interesting experiment (and one I'd expect to fail),

It will, you watch.

but:

1) Drives will usually run for anything between a few hours
to a few days after being opened up providing you're careful
about the environment in which it's done. That's long enough
to recover data off the drive (but forget using the drive long
term obviously is heads *will* crash eventually)

Not many drives fail in a way that needs the heads
replaced without gouging up the media in the process.

2) I'm not sure how much of an issue radial alignment is - won't
modern drives handle the calibration automatically during startup?

Depends on what you do about the platters. If you remove and
replace them, you have buckleys of getting them back the way
they were before you removed them as far as the eccentricity
of the tracks is concerned, because the tracks were written
on the platters after the platters were installed in the drive.

(and periodically during use to minimise the effects of temperature
changes). I'd assume that track zero is found electronically, rather than
being dictated by any mechnical resting place of the head assembly.

Bad assumption. There's a reason you can hear a drive recalibrating.

Head height is doubtless very critical though (even with flying heads)

Especially with flying heads.

and for that you would need a lab to set up properly.

Not necessarily, quite a bit of that comes from the design of the heads.

There's also the problem of how to physically remove the head stack
from the donor drive - those magnets are *strong* and likely something
would get damaged in the process of removing the head assembly...

You dont need to remove them.

The main problem is that many drives need to have the platters
removed to get the heads removed and you have buckleys of
getting them back the way they were before they were removed.

And most drives that need new heads have gouged up
the media in the process of the original heads failing.