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.

- Mike



The heads may well be just fine, often the result of a head crash is the
heads plow into the platters and destroy the surface, too much damage
and the drive can't read the control data and doesn't know where to put
the heads. All you'll succeed in is destroying a perfectly good donor drive.