Hard drive dead - Will swapping the controller from another drive help?

[spacedog]

A friend of mine has an IBM 60GB deskstar IDE hard drive that just died rather unexpectedly one day, no prior problems, no funny noises, just a BSOD and then when the pc was restarted there nothing there.
I checked the bios, changed the cable and the jumpers, still not a peep from it.
Now, we want to try and recover the data on this drive if possible and I remember reading somewhere that sometimes you can pop off the controller board and swap it with the controller from a working hard drive.

Has anyone ever done this? how often does it work and does it have to be the exact same model drive? could I get away with using the controller from a 40 or 80GB drive?

any information would be useful, cheers

 

[sorcerer]

Never tried it myself, but it seems very unlikely that this would be succesfull, first off you will need another deathstar drive, that probably comes from the same batch as the broken one. And since it's a pretty old drive you might have some difficulty in finding one.

Added to the fact that your problem might not be a controller failure, but could be with the disk itself, or with the mechanics inside.

If your desperate to get the data back sometimes hardware recovery firms can get it back, but that will cost quite a bit (around £1000) depending on how much data they recover.