Michael Kennedy wrote:

opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.

Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

Well..... if you fancy doing it just for fun, I've seen drives with 'issues'
being sold on ebay. Nearly bought one myself just so I could try swapping the
controller board.

Graham