"Do it Yourself Hard Disk Repair"

Eric Shufro - 10/2/02

page 2 of 6

Solution:

Cannibalize parts from another hard drive to get the first one functional.

I purchased an identical drive on eBay. However, I first tried the easy way out. I
moved the new controller on to the old drive and powered it up.

BIG MISTAKE. The new controller immediately cooked itself. Now I was
definitely sure that the chip mounted on the side of the head armature was
directly responsible for dropping the voltage applied to the spindle motor. I
imagine this pin shorts the controller which then stops applying voltage to the
spindle motor. So I was exactly back where I began except that now I had two
burned controllers.

I decided to do what had to be done and move the head from the good drive to
the old drive. Moving the platters seemed impossible and obtaining the right tools
would not be easy.

Required Tools:

• Needle Nose Pliers.

• Philips Head Screw Driver.
• Small Flat Head Screw Driver
• T9 Torx Head Screw Driver.

General Tips Before Starting:

1. Attempt to work in the cleanest area possible. A garage is usually not a

good choice.
2. While working within the drive, work slowly and carefully. Be sure not to
touch the platters with your fingers or tools! This will most likely damage
the data on them.
3. The goal is to remove the heads from the good drive and then later
transplanting them into the broken drive. Again, we are moving the heads
since the bad chip is affixed to the head armature which directly connects
to the actual read / write head. Since there is little chance of removing the
chip successfully, I am attempting to move the entire head / arm
mechanism instead.

CONTINUED page 3...

"Do it Yourself Hard Disk Repair"
Eric Shufro - 10/2/02

page 3 of 6

Procedure:

• First, remove the screws holding the controller board to the back of the drive.

The controller is the green thing

• Pull the controller off.
 Drive with controller off
• Flip the drive over.

Time to unscrew
• Remove the Philips head screws holding the drive cover in place. There are
two T9 screws under the stickers, the hold the top of the spindle head armature
bearings in place. Remove them. Remove any additional screws holding down
the cover until the cover becomes loose.
 Don't worry about the print, you'll get a closeup later
• Take the cover off of the drive and set it aside.
• Remove the two screws holding the pin bracket that attaches through the
casing to the back side of the controller. Do not try to remove this yet.
• Remove the single screw holding down the top magnet above the head
armature.

Here's your closeup

• VERY CAREFULLY, use a small flat head screw driver to pry the magnet off
of its seat.
 "Will this erase the charges on my credit card?"

WARNING! These magnets are very strong. Do not allow them to get any
closer to the platters than they are while positioned in their mounting
places. THIS WILL DESTROY any data on the platters!

• Set the magnet down away from the drive and prepare your needle noise
pliers. . . .

The next step is to remove the head locking mechanism.

• Carefully squeeze this piece of plastic gently, but use a moderate amount of
force to lift it off its mounting pin. It takes some effort, but it will come right up. Be
careful! Both this plastic device as well as the one in the next step are both very
fragile and can break easily if squeezed too hard!
• Next, remove the head stop mechanism, located as shown in the picture just
above. Again, squeeze gently and lift it straight off of the pin.
• Gently slide the head off the platter. It will sit nicely in the air without the platter
underneath it. DO NOT touch the heads with your fingers or any other material.
This may damage them.

• Now, prevent the head from moving by holding your finger above the bearing
on top.
 Giving it the finger
• While doing this, turn the drive over. You will see a Torx screw just below the
head (below the controller you removed). Remove this screw carefully. This is
the last screw holding the heads into the drive chassis.
• Lift the head straight out of the chassis. When it is clear, gently pull on the
connection block you removed the screws from earlier. It will lift straight out of the
chassis with the heads.

Getting (hard drive) head

 This is what's left
• Take a deep breath, you are half way there.

Now, do the exact same procedure to the drive with the bad heads.

Once both sets of heads have been removed, simply put the good set of heads in
the old drive chassis. The installation process is very similar to the removal
process.

When you insert new heads into the old chassis, be sure to screw the bottom of
the head armature in while the heads are not over the disk.

Then gently lift on the arm carrying each head (in this case there was only one)
to slide it back over the disk. At this point you should test the arm by swinging it
back and forth very slowly and carefully. It should not drag on the disk
whatsoever.

Reinsert the drive stop and head lock, and then the permanent magnet.

Re-close the case, and screw the controller back on. Now you should be
finished! Plug the drive in and you should be set to go.

Final Caveats

This is a last-ditch means to get data out, and you shouldn't count on this
working. If you absolutely, positively MUST get that data out or you'll lose
thousands and thousands of dollars, look at a data recovery center.
If the data isn't worth THAT much, and you've exhausted all lesser options, you
might want to try this, but there's a lot of things that can go wrong, and there's no
guarantee or even probablility everything will be OK if you do this.

It's an interesting project, though.

Having worked for a major hard drive manufacturer repairing damaged/destroyed

hard drives for a living, I have one small note about the procedure taken to repair
the drive:

The read/write heads are more sensitive than can possibly imagined. There
is a term that should be introduced here: Head Slap.

Sounds like the heads smacking together violently, but its much less than that. If
the top and bottom heads for a single double sided platter ever touch, they are
damaged to some degree. Now here's the fun part: You may not actually damage
the reading/writing element, as they are the size of a spec of dust in the middle of
each head. However, the heads are made of a silicon material, much like IC
chips.

The heads have an amazing role in the drive. As the platters spin, the disk
surface generates a small "film" of air that spins in the same direction as the
platter. As the air passes under the head, the design of each head is such that it
forces a very small amount of air under the head and gently lifts the head off the
surface of the disk, ever so slightly so that it doesn't ride on the surface. (BTW,
the inner most ring of the disk surface of all platters is called the landing pad.)

In order to keep the heads from flying too high off the disk surface, a small
amount of downward tension is built into the armature to provide a spring effect.
When you slide the armature across the disk surface, you introduce small,
probably microscopic, scratches into the surface of the platter. You also wear
away a very small amount of the silicon of the head.

Now when you make it to the edge of the platter, the two heads are no longer
separated by the platter and slap together ever so gently. In the microscopic
world, the slap is like smacking two skyscrapers together. Maybe they don't
splinter into a million pieces, but infinitesimal chips and cracks appear in the
surface of the head. Not necessarily the read/write element, but definitely in the
silicon around it.

When you put the device back together, you introduce stress and over time -
maybe a week, maybe a year - the surfaces scratch, wear down and the head
doesn't fly anymore. New term: Head Crash - when the heads simply grind the
surface of the platter to dust while committing hara-kiri and turning the inside of
the drive case into a black powdery mess.
I've seen it - pretty cool - but not good for storing or retrieving data for that matter,
as the data is now separated into little particles and splattered all around the
inside of the drive case.

(Another BTW: By scraping the magnetic film off the platter and randomly
distributing it around the inside of the drive case, you effectively render the disk
unreadable, which no amount of money will enable a drive recovery company to
bring back. Food for thought if you need to truly delete files from your hard drive.)

So how do you do it without destroying the drive? Build yourself a comb system
that will spread the heads apart and lift them off the platter surface before you
move them at all. We use a series of metal fingers that are tapered to get under
the armature and lift the heads.

Then swing the armature and comb assembly out and remove, but if you take the
comb out - Head Slap! If we ever allow heads to touch, they are in the trash can
a second later. The point is, you can't see the damage done any it may not be
catastrophic, but it will lead to early drive failure.

Just thought I'd let you know. You could probably put together something to
accomplish the head lifting armature swinging maneuver, but be careful. Make
sure it securely holds the heads apart while rotating them out from the platters
and keeps them apart while you make the switch.

And never let any thing touch or slide along the surface of the platter!

I've included a very simple quick sketch of the comb I'm talking about:
Also, the whole cleanliness thing is crucial.

Not that you can't do it at all, just be very sure that no dust or small particles
enter the case. Imagine if one of your eyelashes hit the platter surface. If it's
there when you spin up the drive, it might get wedged under a head and
accomplish pretty much the same thing as a chipped head. Remember that black
powdery mess?

The following (TM Microscopes) link shows what happens to the physical disk
when a drive is shocked (not electric, physical) - a different kind of head slap
occurs.

In this case, the head lifts off the media and smacks back down with enough
force to deform the magnetic layer of the disk. Sometimes you can see them as
anywhere from 1 to 4 dots in a rectangular pattern on the surface of the disk. The
four images on this web page show a visible image next to the magnetic
signature of the same area.

Their point in showing this is that the little lines of magnetic force are actually
altered by the collision. When you alter those lines, you corrupt data. So even
though it may not be major, you can easily lose data by simply dropping a
HDD. And it doesn't take much to do that.

When I was working at the manufacturer, we played around with a mock-up of an

empty HDD outfitted with accelerometers. Those are the little guys that tell you
how much force is being exerted on a object. (Same thing they use in crash test
dummies.)

We'd play with them and see how high we could drop them without exceeding a
given value. (Memory fails me and I can't remember what it was.) Typically, it
only took a drop of 3/4-1 inch onto a hard surface to see damage.

Suspension systems are much better now, but still don't absorb a lot of the
shock. And once you dent the surface of a platter, it's like putting a divot on a
putting green. Part of the material is depressed, while the rim raises up above the
surface.

Spin up the disk and the head will smack it every time it passes over that spot.
Eventually you get a head crash. Another thing to be careful with.