Repairing Disk - is it possible?

nheather

nheather

nheather

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Joined
19 May 2004
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Location
Horsham, West Sussex
My boot disk is showing no sign of life.

I have substituted another boot disk and can get into clean windows.

I have connected tge suspect disk as a secondary disk and it doesn't even appear in the BIOS let alone in windows. I was hoping that I would be able to connect it and at least extract some data off it.

Now because it doesn't even show in the BIOS my hunch is that the control board is fried and the motor, heads, platters could be fine.

So my question - if I could find an identical disk how feasible is it to swap the control boards over. I appreciate that it may not be the problem but worth a shot if it is feasible.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Just removed the board - dead easy.

Ordered the same drive on eBay for £18.50.

May not work but worth a punt.

I'll update to tell you what happens.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Bad sectors are marked in firmware on the controller, if you swap the pcb, and it works copy your data off but don't use the drive to store anything
 
edscdk;30495994 said:
Bad sectors are marked in firmware on the controller, if you swap the pcb, and it works copy your data off but don't use the drive to store anything
Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads up.

Yes, that was the plan, just use it to extract stuff, wouldn't trust it as my main disk.

What do you think about the Mobo and the HDD failing at the same time?

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Standby for the next exciting installment ...

The donor disk turned up. Checked it - it worked.

Removed the circuit board and fitted it to my dead drive.

Still dead.

Just for giggles, fitted the circuit board from my dead drive to the donor drive.

It worked.

So I have proved that the circuit board is fine and it is the main drive (platter, head, motor) that is dead.

Took the back off the dead drive to inspect it.

Platter - flawless, mirror finish, not a scratch in sight.
Motor - platter spins freely.
Head - moves but doesn't feel right - expecting free movement without effort but is quite sticky, especially at the point nearest the spindle.

Data isn't worth an expensive professional recovery. So this weekend (sorry I need time to do it properly), I'm going to try swapping the platter from the dead disk to the donor disk. It is just a single platter so I don't have to worry about alignment.

Not expecting it to work but nothing to lose but my time.

And should it work, I appreciate that it probably won't last long, so I will have a USB drive ready, recover as much as I can and then the HDD is going into the bin.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
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