Sadly, things didn’t go so well this time, but let me go through the full sequence of events. Six months later, apparently a few people still want to know what happened, so this is my story. At the time, I also mentioned that I had a couple hard drives that I was going to try repairing in order to recover some pictures and data for a friend. The “fix” seemed almost too good to be true: dismantle the notebook and blast the GPU with a hairdryer for a couple minutes in order to reflow the solder.
Repair A Wd My Passport Sound Of Death Movie Files AndSo, you go out and buy a working drive that’s as close to identical to your failed drive as possible, and then swap some of the working pieces into the failed drive and presto: you have your data back. In his case, my recollection is that either the drive heads or the motor (or both) was at fault. The idea is pretty simple to grasp: when a hard disk fails, there are various components that can go bad, including the power delivery system, the circuit board, the motor/bearings, and/or the drive heads. The power light is on so I know the I actually have a brother who successfully recovered the data off of a failed laptop drive using a transplant maybe six or seven years back. When I plug the external drive into my MacBook it wont mount. But there’s one option that I have heard can work: the hard drive transplant.I copied a number of Adobe Premier Pro movie files and some mixed Pro Tools files onto a WD My Passport Slim from my Mac Pro in order to work on them on vacation.He has a bunch of photos that were stored on an external HDD, a 250GB Western Digital IDE drive from 7 years ago. So, it can work, but it’s by no means guarant eed.Fast forward to my latest attempts at fixing a crashed hard drive, this time from my dear old dad. After copying the data off to another hard drive, he tossed both the donor drive and the “sort of working” drive in the trash and called himself lucky.That wouldn’t put the kibosh on the transplant idea, though, as the drive heads might be compatible. Here’s where things got really dumb on my part.First, I should have tried swapping the system boards if that didn’t work on the new drive, I would at least know that the firmware was incompatible. But, the donor drive worked – I confirmed this in both the USB enclosure as well as with a direct IDE connection – so I decided to try doing a transplant. I was rash and a little too confident, unfortunately, and when the donor drive arrived I realized I hadn’t done my due diligence:I had a new Western Digital WD2500JB Caviar SE, but this model had different firmware, a different PCB, and a silver case instead of black, and a manufacturing date that was five months later than the dead drive. I went on eBay and looked up the drive model, found a potential donor drive, and ordered it. Lather, rinse, repeat, but the drive is never recognized by the OS when connected via USB, or by the BIOS when connected directly via IDE.I figured I needed to get the exact same firmware revision, and finding someone that was selling the right drive took quite a bit more time. Oops.For my next attempt, I did more research. After the failed drive continued to emit the “click of death”, I reassembled the donor drive and found that it too was now dead and clicking. Not surprisingly, the transplant failed – I tried swapping platters from the dead drive to the working drive, swapping drive heads, swapping circuit boards – basically all of the possible combinations, only not in the most logical order of progression. I tried to be careful, but in retrospect I was really foolhardy with my approach. To prevent this, you need to put a little shim in between each set of heads so that when you move the actuator off the platters, the drive heads don’t snap together. One thing I read is that the drive heads are extremely fragile, and if they touch each other they’ll usually be broken in the process. This is easier said than done. Most likely it has crashed drive heads, so that was the logical next item to swap.Having discovered that the removal and replacement of three platters can be tricky at best, I wanted to avoid doing that again, so I just needed to remove the drive head assembly from the donor and put it in the original drive. Second, to get the head assembly out, on the WD drives you need to remove two screws that hold the top magnet in place, then pry the magnet apart (I used a flat head screwdriver), and then you also need to remove the little drive park stopper that has a smaller magnet that keeps the heads parked when the drive is powered off. I did my best to make sure the platters were rotating, though it’s possible this screwed up the donor head assembly before I got any further. First, I read that you don’t want to move the drive heads/actuator unless the platters are spinning in the proper direction – basically, reduce friction on the drive heads. Except…I screwed up again!A few other pieces of advice are in order at this point. So instead of the above result this is what I had:I put the shim in the proper position, but at this point I feared for the worst. It should look like this:But remember how I said I screwed up? Well, I had the three shims in place I thought, but it turns out I missed on the middle platter so those heads connected. With the top magnet removed and the shims in place, if all goes well you can move the heads off the platters and they won’t touch, and then you can remove the head assembly. You’ll probably make some slight scratches if you’re using homemade shims like me, but I don’t know if that’s enough to fully kill the operation (more on this below). That’s my failed HDD transplant attempt #2.With the previous failures under my belt, you’d hopefully think that I’d learn my lesson and move on – clearly transplanting hard drive parts isn’t my specialty. I also swapped the hardware back into the original donor drive and confirmed that it’s no longer working, so sure enough the drive heads are now dead. Except, the clicking wasn’t quite as bad, so perhaps only those middle heads are dead? Regardless, the BIOS/OS still won’t recognize the drive so the data is still lost. How did we ever live with such performance?This time, I wanted to debunk one of the oft stated rumors of the hard drive repair “professionals”: don’t open up the drive, because as soon as you do your data is as good as gone! And don’t forget the one about needing an ISO Class 5 clean room. I also swapped PCBs as my first test for compatibility and that worked fine – I formatted the drive and copied over 5GB of data, consisting mostly of larger files, and measured a transfer rate of around 15MB/s. I once more sourced a drive from eBay with the same firmware, and I confirmed the drive was working (note the “was”). Where the WD2500JB has three ~83GB platters, the Maxtor has a single 80GB platter, so the transplant should be easier. This time the failed drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB IDE drive from late 2004, but despite the age there’s a potential advantage. Mac 128 emulatorKeep in mind that I’m not trying to get the drive in a permanently working condition I just want to get it to read data for the hour or so it might require for me to copy off important files, and then the drive can hit the trash bin for all I care.
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