In message , Michael A. Terrell
writes
Remember, it used to be "change the boards and that will fix the drive".
I still see people looking for specific types of drives for this sort
of thing. We don't really ever hear about whether they are successful.
(Actually, someone did ask here about it some months back, and we did learn
it didn't work.)
Actually, I have recovered data this way on several (5 IIRC) 3.5" IDE
drives. I've replaced head pre-amp chips but with limited success. It
doesn't fix everything but it's worth trying for 5 minutes of work.

So maybe the board switching worked at some point (especially before
IDE drives), or maybe it just worked in some cases.
It's more likely to work on a modern IDE drive IMHO, the boards are more
generic across a range and are not 'matched' to one HDA, lots of the old
MFM/RLL drives had 'SOT' components which were designed to match the
board to the HDA. ESDI and SCSI drives were more tolerant of a board
swap but drives of that era had boards with obtainable components so a
repair was also possible.
But people grasp
at straws, so they still look for identical drives (of course,
once they start buying junkers, how do they know the "new" drive is
working enough to be a transplant donor?).
It's worth a try, if the donor spins up and your drive doesn't, I'd take
a shot at it.

Someone hears something, finds something about changing heads, and
that's the way to go.

Because for most people, this is shotgunning the problem. They aren't
evaluating the problem, they are trying to impose solutions on it
in the hopes that something will fix the problem.
Most people don't have a clue how difficult it is to carry out this kind
of work with the kind of precision required.

Michael


You could change the heads on some older 8" and larger hard drives,
in the 5 and 10 MB per platter days.
You could change heads and platters on 5.25" drives as well, I've done
it at a repair house I worked for lots of years ago in the 50Mb per
platter days as well.
There were places that sold
rebuilt heads and new platters so you could rebuild a drive for a
minicomputer.
And microcomputers, we used to import heads and platters from the US for
Seagate, Rodime, Micropolis and Maxtor drives.

--
Clint Sharp