Sam Goldwasser wrote:
Sorry, there is no way in H*** that you will be successful if you
open the drive in whatever you might call a cleanroom, let along
trying to swap the platters. And do check out that recent thread
referenced in another posting.

However, the drive concerned here is only a 200MB drive, so no rocket
science. You might just make it work long enough to recover the data.
I'd guess some blowing of clean, canned air while closing the drive will
also help.

Actually he said 200Gb.. so it might be asking a bit much I did this
once on a 4 or 6 gig drive that had seized up, held it sideways to minimize
dust falling in and just broke the platters free by hand. It didn't have
anything I really needed on it, just some nice to have stuff, so I figured
I'd try it since it was on its last legs obviously... it actually worked
fine and continued to as a testing drive for a while before I turfed it,
although I'm sure if I had done a surface scan some errors would have been
found here and there...