Can I rebuild a hard drive to recover data

[John Schroeder]

I have two Seagate 7200 hard drives than are no longer recognized by the desktop or by my laptop via a usb/EDI/SATA adapter. These were my backup drives and have all my photos, itunes, and doc files. Rather than speed $1,000 to have the files extracted by a recovery firm I wondered if its possible to remove the storage media from one drive and install it in a new drive box. Say buy a $60 internal drive open it up and remove the disks, take the disks out of the non-working drive and install it in the new internal drive. Is that even possible? Would the circuitry on the new drive even recognize the replacement disks? Would the drives need to be the same GB? Inquiring minds want to know!

 

[SNGX1275]

I've heard of people buying the exact same drive (needs to be exact so the PCB is the same) and then swapping those out. I've never heard of people removing the platters and putting in a new drive - I think that would be highly risky if not impossible. Try to find a working drive with the same PCB on ebay, then swap the boards.

 

[Tmagic650]

The platers or disks would have to be removed and replaced in a new drive, inside a clean room. This is exactly why some data recovery costs thousands of dollars. Sometimes a replacement circuit board will work, if the platers aren't damaged

 

[cliffordcooley]

I've heard of people buying the exact same drive (needs to be exact so the PCB is the same) and then swapping those out. I've never heard of people removing the platters and putting in a new drive - I think that would be highly risky if not impossible.

You would probably risk damaging the platter by a simple finger print.

I wonder if hard drives with more than one platter, would need to kept in sink with each other. If all heads access at the same time, even a slight rotation of one platter could be a problem.

 

[Tmagic650]

...And any dust, smoke or other airborne contaminants will destroy the read/write heads