On Fri, 7 Nov 2008 19:42:07 -0800 (PST), WT
wrote:

I am looking for an 80 Gb Hitachi Deskstar hard drive, Model
HDS728080PLA380. My brother's machine quit with the Hitachi "click of
death" and I am trying to find a working hard drive like his to swap
parts and try to recover their data. Anyone have one sitting around?
I think his machine is an HP.

I've taken apart one of these drives and found that the plating on the
glass platter has been partially worn off. Not as bad as in these
photos, but still with an easily visible gap:
http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~ken/crash/index.html
Head crash at its worst.
http://www.berdonclaims.com/cases/details.asp?CaseID=173
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_Deskstar

There are some other possible problems. See:
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-ibm-deskstar-hard-disk-drive.htm
for URL's and refernces.

The "firmware" is actually on the first few tracks of the drive. It
gets loaded into RAM on bootup. It cannot be easily re-written or
replaced.

Methinks you will not have any success recovering data from a drive
that exhibits the "click of death" problem. I once wasted about $300
only to discover it was hopeless.

Incidentally, nobody does backups until AFTER they've lost a massive
amount of data and correspondly massive amount of time and money.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558