We are attempting a hard drive platter transplant and need t

We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Michael Squires]

In article <3fb8203c.58268234@news.infoave.net>, <careed@infoave.net> wrote:

We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

Are you sure the drive has to be opened up? The drives I've looked at
have the electronics on a single card that plugs into on the outside.

In my amateur telescope making days we draped a room with plastic
sheeting on all sides, including the roof, and then sprayed water
(mist) into the room. When the mist settled to the floor almost all
the dust was gone, and we then made optics in that room.

MLS
--

Mike Squires (mikes at cs.indiana.edu) 317 233 9456 (w) 812 333 6564 (h)
mikes at siralan.org 546 N Park Ridge Rd., Bloomington, IN 47408

 

[CJT]

careed@infoave.net wrote:

We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

I've heard it said that the bathroom is the least dusty room in a house.

--
After being targeted with gigabytes of trash by the "SWEN" worm, I have
concluded we must conceal our e-mail address. Our true address is the
mirror image of what you see before the "@" symbol. It's a shame such
steps are necessary. ...Charlie

 

[Bill Webb]

If only the electronics are damaged, you should not have to remove
platters or open the drive at all. The control board, located outside
the "sealed" drive chamber, cam be removed and swapped with one from an
IDENTICAL drive. (NB: Occasionally, a drive can be identical right down
to the model numbers, but have a different revision of firmware. In this
case, success is not guaranteed...) Except for motors and the heads
themselves, all of the drive electronics are on this external board.

My brother had to do this once to a drive he had accidentally grounded
against the PC case while it was on. There was a loud 'Snap!' and spark;
the control board was toast. All worked out in the end, but it took some
calling around to find another (used) of the exact same model.


careed@infoave.net wrote:

We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[James Sweet]

<careed@infoave.net> wrote in message
news:3fb8203c.58268234@news.infoave.net...

We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

Just swap the board, you don't have to open the drive. If that doesn't work
forget it, the drive is scrap, there's absolutely no chance of successfully
swapping the platters, you'd never get them aligned correctly, the precision
required is several orders of magnitude greater than what any human has any
hope of.

 

[Bob Kos]

<careed@infoave.net> wrote in message
news:3fb8203c.58268234@news.infoave.net...

We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

Couple things to note:

1) The electronics of a hard drive are external and require a simple bolt on
service. No elaborate clean room needed.

2) Even if you do decide to swap platters, don't sweat the dirt too much.
Scott Mueller has stated in his famous book that he has run the same open
hard drive for a long time at his seminars with apparently little
consequence. You won't be running that long. Just be careful & neat about
everything.

3) You will likely cause far more "invasive damage" disassembling and
reassembling the platters and heads than any dust will ever cause. I
suggest you practice on a few DOA drives to see what I mean. The opposing
heads are quite a treat to deal with. Especially if you have two or three
platters.

4) If you manage to swap platters and get the drive running & reading again,
IMMEDIATELY back it up to a new drive. It won't likely work for long.
Definitely don't try to boot from it if avoidable. Just copy your data & be
done with it.

Ambitious project. I've never succeeded. Good luck with it.

 

[Sam Goldwasser]

A more direct question: Has ANYONE ever succeeded at swapping platters on
a modern IDE or SCSI drive?

--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ Home Page: http://www.repairfaq.org/
Repair | Main Table of Contents: http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/
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Important: The email address in this message header may no longer work. To
contact me, please use the Feedback Form at repairfaq.org. Thanks.



"Bob Kos" <read@text.for.eddress> writes:

careed@infoave.net> wrote in message
news:3fb8203c.58268234@news.infoave.net...
We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.


Couple things to note:

1) The electronics of a hard drive are external and require a simple bolt on
service. No elaborate clean room needed.

2) Even if you do decide to swap platters, don't sweat the dirt too much.
Scott Mueller has stated in his famous book that he has run the same open
hard drive for a long time at his seminars with apparently little
consequence. You won't be running that long. Just be careful & neat about
everything.

3) You will likely cause far more "invasive damage" disassembling and
reassembling the platters and heads than any dust will ever cause. I
suggest you practice on a few DOA drives to see what I mean. The opposing
heads are quite a treat to deal with. Especially if you have two or three
platters.

4) If you manage to swap platters and get the drive running & reading again,
IMMEDIATELY back it up to a new drive. It won't likely work for long.
Definitely don't try to boot from it if avoidable. Just copy your data & be
done with it.

Ambitious project. I've never succeeded. Good luck with it.

 

[Jerry G.]

Many times it is only the circuit board on the drive that fails. You can
swap a board from another identical drive that the inside parts are
defective. The only errors you will have are the hard sector errors that are
burned in to the firmware of the board to match the platters at the time of
manufacturing.

As for swapping inside parts, such as the platters or heads, there is no way
in the world that anyone can do this by hand or eye. The assembly is
precision performed with very highly specialized precision instruments, and
many of the precision assemblies are robotically controlled.

If your data is very valuable, you should contact one of the specialized
companies that can get the data off the platters for you. Infact, they
themselves cannot guarantee the amount of recovery, due to many factors.
But, you still have to pay the recovery cost, because their cost is very
high to do this type of work. These specialists have all the necessary
precision equipment, training, and set-up to do this type of work.


--

Greetings,

Jerry Greenberg GLG Technologies GLG
=========================================
WebPage http://www.zoom-one.com
Electronics http://www.zoom-one.com/electron.htm
=========================================


<careed@infoave.net> wrote in message
news:3fb8203c.58268234@news.infoave.net...
We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[James Sweet]

2) Even if you do decide to swap platters, don't sweat the dirt too much.
Scott Mueller has stated in his famous book that he has run the same open
hard drive for a long time at his seminars with apparently little
consequence. You won't be running that long. Just be careful & neat
about
everything.

This is highly dependent on the drive, I opened a working 20mb drive once to
watch it run, and it failed within a half hour. I opened a 40MB (back when
it was still useably large) to spin the platters because they were stuck, it
ran for years after that, but I didn't run it with the cover off.

3) You will likely cause far more "invasive damage" disassembling and
reassembling the platters and heads than any dust will ever cause. I
suggest you practice on a few DOA drives to see what I mean. The opposing
heads are quite a treat to deal with. Especially if you have two or three
platters.

If there's multiple platters there's absolutely zero chance of aligning them
correctly, even with a machine, it's possible you could swap them and get
the drive to low level format but then you've lost all your data so what's
the point? Even on a relatively small 20gb drive there'll be millions of
bits around one rotation so there's no way you could ever line up more than
one platter with each other.

 

[Bob Kos]

"James Sweet" <jamessweet@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:FpQtb.169348$ao4.547764@attbi_s51...

If there's multiple platters there's absolutely zero chance of aligning
them
correctly, even with a machine, it's possible you could swap them and get
the drive to low level format but then you've lost all your data so what's
the point? Even on a relatively small 20gb drive there'll be millions of
bits around one rotation so there's no way you could ever line up more
than
one platter with each other.

Good thought - I hadn't considered that the platters need to be syncronized.
This job is not doable in the average kitchen laboratory....

 

[do_not_spam_me]

"Bob Kos" <read@text.for.eddress> wrote in message news:<3yLtb.3311$n56.291@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>...

2) Even if you do decide to swap platters, don't sweat the dirt
too much. Scott Mueller has stated in his famous book that he
has run the same open hard drive for a long time at his seminars
with apparently little consequence. You won't be running that
long. Just be careful & neat about everything.

I've heard of people opening up drives as large as 1G, replacing the
cover, and running them for over a year, but my own luck has been much
worse, although I didn't use a clean room, just a tent, gloves, and a
baggie over my head. None of the perfectly good 120M and 200M drives
that I opened worked for more than a few hours, but a couple of 5.25"
20-30M drives on which I installed clear plastic covers worked fine.

I wouldn't trust Scott Mueller on hardware because in a very early
edition of his book he wrote that RLL 2,7 drives required plated
magnetic coatings because the oxide magnetic coatings used for MFM
drives at the time were inadequate, which wasn't true, and the real
limitation was the MFM electronics. Also, Randy Van De Loo, an
engineer who owned a hard drive repair company, Tri-Logic Systems,
back in the 1980s, wrote of Mueller:

---------------------------------------------------------

As far as steppers being able to only position within a single track.
Well,
this is where Mueller's lack of experience with current (since 1984)
technology starts to show. Even the venerable (read cheap) ST-225
has the
ability to micro-step in 1/2 step incrememnts as do ALL Seagate
Stepper
drives. Tandon / Western digital drives use embedded servo feedback
to
"PULL" the stepper from one phase to another like a vioce coil, to
"fine-tune" the positioning of the drives head actuator. Miniscribe's
steppers have had the ability to micro-step, although there were only
a few
models which used that ability.

The alloy used in the substrate of today's drives is based on a 5086
aluminum with a titanium and nickle clad which makes the substrate
literally
movement free in a temperature range from 50-150 degrees F. This is
in
stark contrast to the substrate used in the old 8 / 11 / 14 inch
drives
which would literally CRASH the drive when the platters would warp
when
overheated (over 120 degrees F).

As you have read above, this is not really much of a problem any
longer,
and frankly, I am quite surprised that Mueller didn't do his homework
a
little better on this subject. Given the fact that we have
complimentary
materials (which are used in both voice coil and stepper drives
alike), we
have reduced the positioning error to a couple micro-inches in all
drives.
As a matter of fact with the new high performance stepper motors being
used
in some of the newer 2.5 and 1.8 inch drives, the steppers have a
resolution
of 4,000 TPI. These drives have not yet been released to the public
yet,
but wait a few months and I am sure you will read about them in a
magazine.

I am not surprised that Mueller did not address the bit-cell
propogation
problem. After all, the problem has been around for as long as there
has
been magnetic storage devices. I can see a bit of consistency here
now.
The marketing departments of a few of the manufacturers have tried to
quell
the facts that magnetic storage media revolve around, in an attempt to
sell
the "problem free" storage device. Unfortunately, all storage devices
will
fail. Bar none. Some maybe sooner than others. If Mueller contacted
Conner Peripherals' marketing department for information to use in his
book,
he would have gotten pretty much what you have quoted here. It's far
cheaper to manufacture a drive with a voice coil actuator than it is
to put
a high performance stepper motor in it. Yes, a voice coil can move
faster,
but it is subject to a great deal more problems than a quality stepper
motor. After time, a voice coil's induction will change as it's poles
become more / less magnetized as well as the servo itself becoming
more /
less magnetized.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

[Jim Adney]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 01:20:10 GMT careed@infoave.net wrote:

We're thinking along the line of a rectangular plexiglas box with a
small fan with a filter, non-powdered rubber gloves...It's a longshot,
we know, but the electronics are dead and no money for a professional
recovery job. Any help would be appreciated.

Not sure where one buys them, but there are clear plastic "glove bags"
made, which are cheap and disposable. They would be plenty big enough
to work on a disk drive.

-
-----------------------------------------------
Jim Adney jadney@vwtype3.org
Madison, WI 53711 USA
-----------------------------------------------