"Ben Galvin" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to repair my crashed 200Gb Western Digital hard disk
(WD2000JB).
A few days ago it started making a strange buzzing noise, then about 10
minutes later died completely. Naturally, I had forgotten to backup the
contents of the drive (lesson learned). I tried a few hard drive recovery
services but they were all quoting about $2500 for recovery of a hard disk
with a mechanical fault - a bit steep for me.

Ok, so I figured I may as well have a go myself - nothing to lose. I setup
up a 'clean room' in my bathroom (cleaned it out, used an ion generator
and
the hot steam from the shower to temporarily settle the dust down). I know
its nothing compared to a professional one, but it's the best I can do. I
opened the hard drive for about 30 seconds, enough to determine that the
platters couldn't be moved around by hand. I opened another similar hard
drive (with no data on it) and was able to move the platters easily, so
I'm
assuming there must be something wrong with the bearings in the hard disk.
I've managed to get hold of another (almost) identical motor/bearing
assembly, and I'm going to have a go at swapping them over.

My problem is that my hard drive has 2 platters inside it (basically like
2
CDs stacked on top of each other with a 1cm gap between them), but I don't
know if I need to ensure that they stay perfectly aligned when I moved
them
to the new spindle or not (imagine rotating the top cd around a vertical
axis by 10 degrees - the data would no longer be sychronised between the 2
platters). There are no marks or holes to tell the orientation of the
platters, so it would be very hard to take them both off one spindle, and
put them on to the new one and preserve this relationship exactly.

Does anyone know if I need to do this, or have any other advise?

Thanks,

Ben




I've never seen one where the spindle motor actually locked up, that's
interesting. Once you've opened the drive though there's little chance of
being able to recover the data and if you swap the platters into another
drive it most certainly won't work. I really doubt you'll be able to align
the platters with anywhere near the extreme precision that would be required
even if you do somehow manage to put them in without destroying the heads
and at that point even in the cleanest room of your house you've still got a
drive full of dust.