Hi guys,
Doing drive repairs is really just a hobby project for me, and something I've always wanted to learn to do.. at least on a very basic level. that being said, I've bought a lot of tools and done a lot of homework to make this possible, and have *finally* gotten to the point where I can do a complete teardown of a drive, and put it together again, then still do a 100% successful read of all the data. and i can do it on a relatively consistent basis.
Now, my goal is do an actual head swap, and get successful reads. with the ultimate goal of getting an actual drive that failed (just a bad head, no surface damage.. at least none visible) to read again.
for the record, the drive in question is a quantum fireball 30gb lc30a011 drive that came out of an old iMac. I have found several non-refurbished matches, and a bunch of 'close matches'. so before going forward with the real head swap I figured I'd do some testing against the close matches (two of which exactly matched each other, almost down to the serial number), and here's where things got strange.
I broke down both drives, and swapped the heads, then fired the drives up. After spin-up, they refused to initialize. All I hear is the click of death sound. Thinking I had blown the heads, but wanting to learn from my mistakes and not willing to give up, I swapped them back into their original drives and fired the drives up. this time, I got a full initialization and a successful read from both drives. Basically, to me, this tells me that the heads for whatever reason couldn't understand the platters they were sitting over. but i would like some input into this
I guess the long and short of this question is, since I matched every single number on each drive, and the parts still couldn't read from each other, what am I missing that would make finding a true match easier? What is important in finding an exact match /and being sure that it really is one for a quantum drive?
Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated!
-Chris
Chris,
My knowledge on physical hard-drive repair is next to nill, but I seem to recall reading something a while back in regards to drive part replacement and the fact that if the heads themselves were replaced that some soft initializiation needed to be modified on the drive due to where the head is supposed to begin at drive startup relative to the position on the platters.
I have no idea if this is what caused your problem, but maybe it's an avenue to pursue some research in?
Jeff
I considered that avenue, but dollars wise, droping $9k on something like the deepspar tools is really waaay out of my league (other suggestions would be welcomed tho! ) especially if i'm not even sure that's the solution ). Currently, most of my information comes from Scott Moulton's "myHardDriveDied.com" blog at http//
according to him, exact match drives can have the parts swapped interchangeably w/o needing special software modifications. the question really now becomes, what are the criterion being used for an exactly matching drive if everything written on the drive matches? )
-Chris
I think this might be the wrong forum for this discussion after all. 'Forensic Focus' is really the step i need after 'data recovery / drive repair', for which there is a whole site/forum for out there that i probably should have been looking for and posting to first.
for what its worth, after doing some searching on HDDGuru.com 's forum for the quantum matching and head replacement issue, the general consensus is that every head/platter pairing is unique, and as such performing a head swap isn't possible.
@jeff there is some mention of some settings that can be changed to make the heads work, possibly using PC3000 or salvation data, but that seems to be a very well kept secret if it exists, but your post definitely drove me in the right direction to find this out!
Thanks to everyone who replied both publicly and privately! If anyone happens to be following this thread, if i decide to push forward with it, it'll be found on HDDGuru instead.
-Chris