Moving platters from one HD to another

If you need the data that bad then send it to the pros.

From my last line: I know that I should send the HD to professionals, but the data in the HD is not worth it and even the HD is very obsolete, so I'd rather give it a try myself and if it works, good; otherwise nevermind.

You would have the same motor speed, the same head speed and they same hear read band to even come close.  In other words.  same make, model and revision of your current hard drive to attempt this.

In addition you would need a clean room with the prope specs ad I dobt that you have acces to one.

Any small speck of dust will ruin the drive.

try refridgerator in a baggie over night, and if not then freeze i, you may get a few minutes of working drive time.

I hope this helps !

Yeah, I don't think you'd ever make this work. Have you tried freezing the drive? Wrap it in paper towels, put it in a zip loc bag and throw it in the freezer for an hour or so. Be ready to fire it up as a secondary drive and see if it works. I've managed to revover data off of many drives like this in the past. If you're moving LOTS of data, do it in chunks. You may have to "re-freeze" after a while.

Do you want to fix it just for the fun of it?

If the data does not matter and the drive will not be ok to use after you are finished, why do you want to do this?

Of course I'd do it only if there is hope to recover the data.
The lost data is somewhat important (mainly pictures and music), but not worth the $1000+ that professional recovery would cost. (the pictures are gone but there weren't many important ones, and for music, it would cost less to just buy it again) The really important data was regularly backed-up and not lost.
Also note that I'd use the drive with the replaced platters just for the time needed to copy data somewhere else and then I'd trash both the original broken HD and the one that I'd have to use to recover data.

The feezing and dropping method=old wives tales.

You chances of fixing it by yourself=slim to none.

But don't say we didn't warn you.

There are some places that will fix it for about $375

http://www.gillware.com/

I'll try the refrigerator. Anyway regarding the clean room, I can confirm that I had a drive repaired replacing it with an identical model and swapping the platters OUT OF A CLEAN-ROOM. And it worked long enough to copy the data. Anyway this was done by an expert (which clearly knew how to swap platters better than me). So in my opinion , the clean room is secondary and, to same extent, mythical (try opening one of your drives, leave it in the open air for a while without touching the platters, use some compressed air to remove the most obvious dust, close it and see that you can still read it for a long time), the most important thing is to swap the platters without damaging them or the heads.

Rather than a clean room, you can work inside a clear plastic bag wearing surgeon's gloves.  Everything hinges on being able to find an identical, operable drive.

Refrigerating and/or freezing or a sharp rap for stuck heads are not "old wives tales."   Do try non-destructive methods such as those first.

This is a reliable data recovery company that is less expensive than any other I'm aware of:

http://www.gillware.com/

Then the folks at Seagate are wrong saying that it is?

I knew the guy at Seagate in the Silcon Valley that oversaw the manufacture of their drives ,he said it's rubbish.

Sorry,but they have a bit more credibilty than somebody posting that it worked for them in the past.

NOBODY has scientifically proved that has worked,it is hearsay and nothing more, otherwise Seagate ,Maxtor ,Hitachi,WD and company would have something other to say about those methods other than they don't work and if you value your data,don't do it.

If you jump off a 100 story building often enough while flapping your arms, you might not die,but that doesn't mean that flapping your arms saved you fron dying.

From the Gilware site:

4. Keep the drive in a dry room at moderate temperature.

>Rather than a clean room, you can work inside a clear plastic bag wearing surgeon's gloves.

Plastic bags are notorious for buildup of static electricity which can cause even more issues, in that there are CMOS devices on the HDA itself.

You don't even know you discharged static electricty untill it reaches 10,000 volts.(that zap you get in the winter)

I started out as a bench tech in the Valley and static handling procedures, along with the specialzed equipment required
to fix these things, is there for a reason.

Refrigerating drives works often enough to be worth a try.  It's especially effective for drives that fail when they heat up to normal operating temperature.  Buys some extra time to recover data if one works quickly.  Heads binding due to "sticktion" is now rare, but can occur.

For info on keeping drive clean (and working inside clear plastic bags), Google hard drive window mod.  It was a popular mod until windowed Raptors appeared.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but should keep it professional.  Experience is the greatest teacher of all.  What works, works.

Well again I'll try the refrigerator and let you know of the outcome next week. (maybe it's an old wives tale but I don't see how it can do harm).
If it doesn'r work I'd like to swap platters.
Nobody with good experience on this?

The dropping seems more appropriate for stuck heads which is not my case...

As a last ditch effort for people that don't really care one way or the other if they get their data back.they can do whatever they want(including praying to the great god of servo).but my point is that for anybody contemplating using those methods might be swayed by saying, "Look,I might be able to save a few bucks,I saw it out on the web and it's gotta be true."

It's like a politician saying the sky is falling,if it is repeated enough,people begin to accept it as fact.

I think this is one of those times when somebody has to say no .it's not true and to not do so would be a disservice to those who use this site for research.

And unless somebody can give verifiable, scientific evidence that it works,I will label it as a fallacy.

Enough for today,gotta get back to my droogs,they're giving me a pain in the gulliver.

Hope I made everything as clear as an azure sky of deepest summer.

People come here for solutions, not opinions.

Refrigerating or freezing a drive is a tried and true technique that works about 25% of the time in my experience.  That's often enough for it to be worth trying.  I've had occasion to try on a number of failed drives (more than a hundred) that had not experienced catastropic electronics failures such as blown chips.  

Ditto willcomp... I don't care what the HD manufacturers say, it's worked for me on more than one occasion. I've even found it necessary to strap ice packs to the drive to keep it cold enough to copy off a 1.2GB Outlook pst file.

Ignoring the vast experience of the members here, is this scientific enough for you?
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

The feezing and dropping method=old wives tales.

Oh no they are NOT, at least the freezing. No freezing is not the end all repair. It only will fix a drive that has gone bad a certaian way,,,, not the click of death.  I have saved two critical HDs with the freezer trick. I think it only works on a drive that mechanically it is slightly off track and freezing makes some of the parts expand to take up sloppy slack.  iF YOU DO DO THE FREEZER DEAL , YOU HAVE ONE AND ONLY ONE CHANCE. I usually will use the second ide channel with nothing else on it. Practice once running from the freezer hooking up booting to ghiost or whatever B4 you actually do it. As soon as the drive starts to form little drops of water, it will slowly stop reading.

oh yeah put in a plastic bag and tape, not too much,

Didn't expound earlier and should have.  I start with placing bare drive on a wire rack in refrigerator (not freezer) overnight or longer.  Condensation is then not a problem.  If I cannot get enough run time, will try freezing.  Seal in a zip-lock freezer duty bag and remove as much air as possible

Freezing didn't help much (I got the drive working only once and for only a couple of minutes, not enough to recover data). So Nobus gets the points for actually providing the kind of info I asked for.

Bummer! How long did you freeze it? Regardless, I would like to point out that a dead drive DID come back to life after the freeze.

Yes, I'm not saying freezing never works. It almost worked for me (drive back to life for 2 minutes - after that, even freezing again didn't help)