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?

Honestly I don't even know that I can get the heads out without screwing
them up, but I figure it is worth a shot if I can find one of these drives
someone is going to junk due to bad electronics.


- Mike

"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?

Honestly I don't even know that I can get the heads out without screwing
them up, but I figure it is worth a shot if I can find one of these drives
someone is going to junk due to bad electronics.

Forget it, no way.

If the data is that important, send it to a professional data recovery
service. About all you'll succeed in doing is making it impossible for
any hope of any recovery at all. Period.

--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ: http://www.repairfaq.org/
Repair | Main Table of Contents: http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/
+Lasers | Sam's Laser FAQ: http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/lasersam.htm
| Mirror Sites: http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_mirror.html

Important: Anything sent to the email address in the message header above is
ignored unless my full name AND either lasers or electronics is included in the
subject line. Or, you can contact me via the Feedback Form in the FAQs.

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

"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?

Honestly I don't even know that I can get the heads out without screwing
them up, but I figure it is worth a shot if I can find one of these
drives
someone is going to junk due to bad electronics.

Forget it, no way.

If the data is that important, send it to a professional data recovery
service. About all you'll succeed in doing is making it impossible for
any hope of any recovery at all. Period.

--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ: http://www.repairfaq.org/
Repair | Main Table of Contents: http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/
+Lasers | Sam's Laser FAQ: http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/lasersam.htm
| Mirror Sites: http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_mirror.html

Important: Anything sent to the email address in the message header above
is
ignored unless my full name AND either lasers or electronics is included
in the
subject line. Or, you can contact me via the Feedback Form in the FAQs.

On Sun, 8 Oct 2006 22:00:16 -0400, "Michael Kennedy"
wrote:

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 think that's intended as a joke. The methods described there would
best be described as data destruction rather than recovery. Just
opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.
Andy Cuffe

Andy Cuffe spake thus:

On Sun, 8 Oct 2006 22:00:16 -0400, "Michael Kennedy"
wrote:

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/

I think that's intended as a joke. The methods described there would
best be described as data destruction rather than recovery. Just
opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.
Andy Cuffe

I wonder; the person who wrote those instructions sounds as if they know
what they're talking about, perhaps because they're a HDD tech. I always
thought too that such a thing was impossible: one tiny speck of dust and
bam! that's it; but maybe it's not beyond us mere mortals without bunny
suits and sub-micron air filters to do this.

I don't think I'll be trying this any time soon, though.


--
Save the Planet
Kill Yourself

- motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)

"Andy Cuffe" wrote in message
news
I think that's intended as a joke. The methods described there would
best be described as data destruction rather than recovery. Just
opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening outside
of a clean room is very risky.

opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.


Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

- Mike

Michael Kennedy wrote:

opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.

Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

- Mike


Those random dust particles will destroy both the head, and the
media.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

hmm.. well I guess its a lost cause.

- Mike

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...
Michael Kennedy wrote:

opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.

Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the
un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too
worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

- Mike


Those random dust particles will destroy both the head, and the
media.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Michael A. Terrell wrote:

opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Is 10GB modern? Recently i was cleaning up my junk box and inspecting
data on old drives. There was this 2002 10GB drive going to be junked.
Just for fun i opened it and let it run for a while in my very dusty
shack, doing some copy and chkdsk actions. No problems seen in event
log, although i guess i should have tried some SMART tools to read out
the health status.

After half an hour or so the fun was over and i junked the drive.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.

Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

Those random dust particles will destroy both the head, and the media.

There is a filter inside every drive. Dust will be collected in that
filter very soon after startup. Besides, the drive is already defective
so what's to lose?

I think that with the proper tools and careful work in a relatively
clean enviroment (bathroom), you could very well try to repair the
drive and stand a good chance. Although I would start with building
the disk pack in a working same model drive, and not changing heads.

--
Joop van der Velden -

data on old drives. There was this 2002 10GB drive going to be junked.
Just for fun i opened it and let it run for a while in my very dusty
shack, doing some copy and chkdsk actions. No problems seen in event
log, although i guess i should have tried some SMART tools to read out
the health status.


I agree - give it a try. Whatever happens you will learn something and
if you keep us informed, so will we.

I have run a defective travelstar for a few hours with the top off. It
does kill the drive in the end, but you might have enough time to get
some data off.

To change the heads you will almost certainly have to dismantle the
disc stack and remove the head assembly from its mounting.

Before doing anything so drastic, are you sure that the control pcb has
not been damaged? You could try swapping that first before opening the
drive housing.

John

Michael Kennedy wrote:

opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.

Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

Well..... if you fancy doing it just for fun, I've seen drives with 'issues'
being sold on ebay. Nearly bought one myself just so I could try swapping the
controller board.

Graham

Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.

Ancient_Hacker wrote:

Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.

Only in a small place I'd expect.

Graham

"Michael Kennedy" wrote in message
. ..
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?

Honestly I don't even know that I can get the heads out without screwing
them up, but I figure it is worth a shot if I can find one of these drives
someone is going to junk due to bad electronics.


- Mike



It's worth a try as an experiment. I really doubt you'll be successful.
A couple of hints - the parts hdd is required to be EXACTLY identical.
As previously mentioned try the PCB swap first - after verifying the parts
drive is a good drive.

I would suggest finding 3 or 4 hdd's to practice on before you try the one
you are attempting to recover from.

btw a head stack swap on a laptop drive is extremely difficult due to the
physical size.

Eeyore wrote:
Ancient_Hacker wrote:

Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.

Only in a small place I'd expect.

Usually a whole head-width of tracks get scraped up. 40 to 80 tracks.

and as soon as the new heads go over the bad spot you're likely to have
a second set of bad heads.

Ancient_Hacker wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Ancient_Hacker wrote:
Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.

Only in a small place I'd expect.

Usually a whole head-width of tracks get scraped up. 40 to 80 tracks.

and as soon as the new heads go over the bad spot you're likely to have
a second set of bad heads.

You may of course be right but since it's just for interest value why not give it ago
?

Graham

"Ancient_Hacker" ) writes:
Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.


I'm sure some or most of it is on the level of "urban legend". An
idea, which may have some truth if worked in some circles moves
out into the mainstream, where someone knows a guy who did it. But
by the time it gets to that point, much of the information is stripped
off.

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.)

So maybe the board switching worked at some point (especially before
IDE drives), or maybe it just worked in some cases. 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?).

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.

Michael

Joop van der Velden wrote:

I think that with the proper tools and careful work in a relatively
clean enviroment (bathroom), you could very well try to repair the
drive and stand a good chance. Although I would start with building
the disk pack in a working same model drive, and not changing heads.


From my years of using a bathroom as a darkroom, dust is pretty
prevalent even there. But if you vacuum every surface first, including
walls and ceilings, you cut it way down.

Eeyore wrote:
Ancient_Hacker wrote:


You may of course be right but since it's just for interest value why not give it ago


Well, if you have the spare time, sure.


I'd estimate about a 4% chance of success so that's too low for me to
pursue.

"Ancient_Hacker" ) writes:
Eeyore wrote:
Ancient_Hacker wrote:


You may of course be right but since it's just for interest value why not give it ago


Well, if you have the spare time, sure.


I'd estimate about a 4% chance of success so that's too low for me to
pursue.

And the original poster wanted to recover some photos.

The "learning value" only came in later, or from one of the repliers.

But what does one learn? That it can be done? Something for the future?

Most people will never have a need for doing this a second time, even
if successful the first time.

And given the poster was going to follow some text, I doubt he can
learn from the experience, because if he's successful all he's
learned is how to follow the instructions, if he fails I doubt
he has any safety net to help him figure out why.

I would urge everyone to open up a hard drive they are about to
toss out. They can grab the magnets, and that first hand viewing
of the insides is a good learning experience. It costs nothing
but a few minutes of time. But after that, the cost is going to go
up.

Michael

Michael Black wrote:

"Ancient_Hacker" ) writes:
Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.


I'm sure some or most of it is on the level of "urban legend". An
idea, which may have some truth if worked in some circles moves
out into the mainstream, where someone knows a guy who did it. But
by the time it gets to that point, much of the information is stripped
off.

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.)

So maybe the board switching worked at some point (especially before
IDE drives), or maybe it just worked in some cases. 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?).

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.

Michael


You could change the heads on some older 8" and larger hard drives,
in the 5 and 10 MB per platter days. There were places that sold
rebuilt heads and new platters so you could rebuild a drive for a
minicomputer. I knew somone who used to rebuild drives for Data general
minicomputers in a home made plexiglass box that was presurized with air
that was passed through a pair of HEPA filters so any dust was blown out
the front of the box. It was crude, but worked on the crude drives of
the day.



--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

On 9 Oct 2006 15:40:45 GMT, (Michael Black)
wrote:


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.)

So maybe the board switching worked at some point (especially before
IDE drives), or maybe it just worked in some cases. 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?).

I've fixed a few drives by changing boards, but it was never for the
typical clunk clunk clunk symptom. These were cases of boards that
were damaged by someone shorting it against the case, a bad motor
driver, or an IC that was obviously bad.
Andy Cuffe

On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 03:50:55 GMT, "Homer J Simpson"
wrote:


"Andy Cuffe" wrote in message
news
I think that's intended as a joke. The methods described there would
best be described as data destruction rather than recovery. Just
opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening outside
of a clean room is very risky.


It depends on the drive. I've opened older drives that would run for
quite a while. The few semi-working modern drives I've opened didn't
last more than a few seconds before totally failing. The higher the
data density is, the less tolerant of dust they are.

Does anyone have any inside knowledge of what professional data
recovery companies actually do? I've opened plenty of bad drives that
have no obvious damage to the heads, or disks.

Andy Cuffe

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

As an experiment to see if newer drives can run without the cover on them I
took apart a 40 gb diamondMax plus 8 drive. It is currently running in the
computer that I'm using and has been working for the last 45 mins.

It is similar to the laptop drive in that it doesn't use the top of the
first platter. So any dust that lands there won't be directly in the path of
a head.

I think I'm going to try this after I pratice on some old hdd's. Who knows
might even work, but like I said I'm not really expecting it to.


"Joop van der Velden" wrote in message
...
Michael A. Terrell wrote:

opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.

Is 10GB modern? Recently i was cleaning up my junk box and inspecting
data on old drives. There was this 2002 10GB drive going to be junked.
Just for fun i opened it and let it run for a while in my very dusty
shack, doing some copy and chkdsk actions. No problems seen in event
log, although i guess i should have tried some SMART tools to read out
the health status.

After half an hour or so the fun was over and i junked the drive.

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.

Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if
I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the
un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too
worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

Those random dust particles will destroy both the head, and the media.

There is a filter inside every drive. Dust will be collected in that
filter very soon after startup. Besides, the drive is already defective
so what's to lose?

I think that with the proper tools and careful work in a relatively
clean enviroment (bathroom), you could very well try to repair the
drive and stand a good chance. Although I would start with building
the disk pack in a working same model drive, and not changing heads.

--
Joop van der Velden -

Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Honestly I don't even know that I can get the heads out without screwing
them up, but I figure it is worth a shot if I can find one of these drives
someone is going to junk due to bad electronics.


- Mike




You can't, don't even bother. The precision required is orders of
magnitude greater than anything you can accomplish at home. There's 60
billion bits on those tiny platters, the alignment has to be mind
bogglingly accurate to read them.

Michael Kennedy wrote:
opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately.


Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening
outside of a clean room is very risky.



Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I
can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the un
crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too worried
about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

- Mike



The heads may well be just fine, often the result of a head crash is the
heads plow into the platters and destroy the surface, too much damage
and the drive can't read the control data and doesn't know where to put
the heads. All you'll succeed in is destroying a perfectly good donor drive.

Well..... if you fancy doing it just for fun, I've seen drives with 'issues'
being sold on ebay. Nearly bought one myself just so I could try swapping the
controller board.



That does work occasionally, or did. Years ago I swapped the controller
on a 1.2gb Connor drive, at the time it was reasonably big, used the
drive for the next 3 years on the transplanted controller with no
issues. I've tried it one other time on a newer 30GB drive and it didn't
work.

The drive was dropped while running.


Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.

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
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Michael Black wrote:

"Ancient_Hacker" ) writes:
Michael Kennedy wrote:
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?

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the
heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.


I'm sure some or most of it is on the level of "urban legend". An
idea, which may have some truth if worked in some circles moves
out into the mainstream, where someone knows a guy who did it. But
by the time it gets to that point, much of the information is stripped
off.

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.)

So maybe the board switching worked at some point (especially before
IDE drives), or maybe it just worked in some cases. 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?).

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.

One thing that does puzzle me, is even if the control pcb is replaced, the
replacement controller won't have the correct flaw map ! Ppl may not know about
this stuff if they've never had to low level format a drive. These days it's done
at the factory you see.


Graham

Andy Cuffe wrote:

Does anyone have any inside knowledge of what professional data
recovery companies actually do? I've opened plenty of bad drives that
have no obvious damage to the heads, or disks.

They certainly have clean rooms and keep a large stock of drives for the spare
parts they'll need.

Graham

In message , Eeyore
writes
One thing that does puzzle me, is even if the control pcb is replaced, the
replacement controller won't have the correct flaw map !
Surely this is stored on the HDA and not the controller PCB?
Ppl may not know about
this stuff if they've never had to low level format a drive. These days
it's done
at the factory you see.
Not many people know the joy of prodding around using debug to find the
LLF code entry point on a controller you have no documents for... Ahh,
happy days.


Graham


--
Clint Sharp

Michael Kennedy ha escrito:

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?

Honestly I don't even know that I can get the heads out without screwing
them up, but I figure it is worth a shot if I can find one of these drives
someone is going to junk due to bad electronics.


- Mike

The article cleverly avoids to explain something very important: You
remove the platter stack to replace the heads, ok, but when try to
reasembly it, how do you realign each platter with respect the others?
I think that if any platter is shifted even a 0.000001 deg. with
respect to the other(s), the data will be unreadable. You can´t mark
the platters, and even if you can, the mark will be too coarse to be
efective as an alignment guide. Even worse: how to handle each platter
to avoid any damage to it´s magnetic surface? If even handling the
magnetic disk of a disquette damages it, and in those disks the data
density is relatively low (only 80 tracks per side), how to avoid
damage to a glass disk with a density thousand of times greater than
the density of a diskette?

No, I don´t think the person who wrote the article has ever attempted
to do what he claims, or if he has done it, he did it in a very
different environment and using different tools than those described in
the article.

Clint Sharp ) writes:

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 the pre-IDE drives gave you a lot of access to the drive, since
the controller was separate. MOve the controller to the drive, as
is the case with IDE drives, and you don't have that low level access.

Pre-IDE, the bad sectors on the drives would be written on the drives,
and you'd tell something (I guess the formatting software but I never
really had any experience with pre-IDE drives) to avoid those sectors.
With IDE drives, the drive itself keeps track of such things.

ANd this is what came of the thread some months back. It was pointed
ou that the eeprom on the board was likely keeping track of those bad
sectors, and when the board was swapped, it no longer matched the
state of the new drive.

Michael

But the pre-IDE drives gave you a lot of access to the drive, since
the controller was separate. MOve the controller to the drive, as
is the case with IDE drives, and you don't have that low level access.

Pre-IDE, the bad sectors on the drives would be written on the drives,
and you'd tell something (I guess the formatting software but I never
really had any experience with pre-IDE drives) to avoid those sectors.
With IDE drives, the drive itself keeps track of such things.

ANd this is what came of the thread some months back. It was pointed
ou that the eeprom on the board was likely keeping track of those bad
sectors, and when the board was swapped, it no longer matched the
state of the new drive.

Michael



An IDE drive is the only one I've done it on and succeeded, as advanced
as modern drives are though I would expect it to be a lot less likely to
work, this was a rather old IDE from around '96.

Thats becasue you don't remove the platters in the defective drive. You
remove them in the donar drive and carefuly slide the head stack over the
platters in the defective drive.

- Mike

"lsmartino" wrote in message
oups.com...

Michael Kennedy ha escrito:

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?

Honestly I don't even know that I can get the heads out without screwing
them up, but I figure it is worth a shot if I can find one of these drives
someone is going to junk due to bad electronics.


- Mike

The article cleverly avoids to explain something very important: You
remove the platter stack to replace the heads, ok, but when try to
reasembly it, how do you realign each platter with respect the others?
I think that if any platter is shifted even a 0.000001 deg. with
respect to the other(s), the data will be unreadable. You can´t mark
the platters, and even if you can, the mark will be too coarse to be
efective as an alignment guide. Even worse: how to handle each platter
to avoid any damage to it´s magnetic surface? If even handling the
magnetic disk of a disquette damages it, and in those disks the data
density is relatively low (only 80 tracks per side), how to avoid
damage to a glass disk with a density thousand of times greater than
the density of a diskette?

No, I don´t think the person who wrote the article has ever attempted
to do what he claims, or if he has done it, he did it in a very
different environment and using different tools than those described in
the article.

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006 07:35:11 +1000, Franc Zabkar
wrote:


"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."


That's very true. In fact, using a bulk tape eraser on a working
drive is a very effective way of rendering it useless. As soon as the
low level format has been erased it will start clunking like a drive
with a crashed head.
Andy Cuffe

On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 22:53:40 +0100, Eeyore
wrote:



Andy Cuffe wrote:

Does anyone have any inside knowledge of what professional data
recovery companies actually do? I've opened plenty of bad drives that
have no obvious damage to the heads, or disks.

They certainly have clean rooms and keep a large stock of drives for the spare
parts they'll need.

Graham

And they charge dearly for the use of them. I've only used that type
of service once (consultant dropped a laptop) - the bill was something
over $2000US.

John