On Sun, 8 Oct 2006 22:00:16 -0400, "Michael Kennedy"
put finger to keyboard and composed:
Theres nothing really important on there. My friend dropped their laptop and
they didn't have their photos backed up on cd's. I read an article about
doing this yourself, and thought what the heck, it might be kind of fun,
even if it didn't work.
Here is the website
http://hddguru.com/content/en/articl...stack-Q-and-A/
- Mike
I would think that the platters and head stack would have been low
level formatted as an assembly. The heads in a replacement stack could
never match the alignment of the original, so I would think that the
voice coil servo would twitch every time there was a head switch. If
the drive uses an embedded servo, then the user might notice some
degradation in seek times, but if the drive has a separate servo head
(are there any that still do?), then a head stack replacement will
never succeed.
As for replacing PCBs, I would think that this may also fail if the
flash EEPROM is used to store SMART data and defect maps. In fact
there is at least one data recovery website that states that certain
WD Caviar drives cannot be recovered with PCB swaps.
Another point with which I take issue is the claim that a drive can be
"low level formatted":
http://hddguru.com/content/en/softwa...l-Format-Tool/
This hasn't been possible since the very early days, some 15 years
ago, and especially not since the advent of embedded servos. Today the
term means little more than wiping all data from the drive.
See
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Hard...0000000036.htm
"You cannot format the disk drive at low level. The servo, sector
layout and defect management information contained in the low level
format is designed to last the life of the drive. As such, this
information cannot be overwritten outside of the factory."
"Sam Goldwasser" wrote in message
...
"Michael Kennedy" writes:
Anybody know where I can find a 60gb Hitachi Travelstar model
IC25N060ATMR04-0 hard drive so that I can replace the heads in one that
was
dropped while running?
- Franc Zabkar
--
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