If you are going to insist. Please get a clean room or build a clean box and open your drive within the clean box. This will reduce any further damages.

Make sure you got the right donor head. Just buying the same model HDD will not give you the working head on your damaged drive.

After the head swap, make sure your drive is facing the alignment issue rather than incompatible head. If its an alighnment issue, try to work around it. This may take an hour or more.

If your problem is in the FW, then any head swap will not fix the problem. You need to restore the FW via expensive tools.

All I can say is GOOD LUCK!!! If you really need your music, some one will make a lot of money after you failed to recover your files. Standby for the $3000 bill for your data...

If 10 years of your work were put on a HDD without a backup and are not worth , let's say, 3000 $ (approx, the cost for such case) , there's nothing more to say.

Sorry no more help from me. However a "good luck" is free. Good luck.

hamsaya,

I need to go soon outside, but i wish to say some words before i go:
We especially taken a lot of time to think + research for the solution for alignment, and finally solved it with a really expensive special unit wich use a laser measurer head in 0.25 - 0.1 micron precisely.
I don't think you can solve this problem alone....

Anyway, i wish you a good decision, not else what i can do...

Janos

NC, post the construction plans ....

Why on earth do people think they can do instantly what others have take years of practice and $10,000's to achieve?

Sure, my car's engine has seized, but do I try and fix it myself? Duh!! I think not!

My heads hurts, I think I've got a brain tumour. Surely all I need is the right kitchen knife and I can fix it, right? Just need to know which knife to use and where to stab aimlessly?

Help and advice is given (and has been) free of charge, and because it's not want you wanna hear, you ignore it.

Wake up and smell the coffee!

Sorry to appear so harsh, but this sort of attitude annoys me!

No, I live with what I do. It's different !

I just bought this hard disk, I had 2 back up but they were 80 GIG and 300 GIG, I placed all the files in this new HD. I cleaned up my 80 GIG and wanted to keep an ISO back up of everyting in 300 GIG but before I do that ... this happened...

Ok, if you still have the 300 Gb drive intact you are only missing the 80 Gb one.
How did you cleaned it up and did you re-write things to the drive after deleting/formating ?

If you just format your old drive the data will be there, if you haven't re-written to it.

It will be very cheap to get your data back from the deleted 80 Gb drive, plus the data of your 300 Gb drive you will have all your data back without having to fix the problematic WD drive.

:shock:

Yes, the data was re-written then. You won't be able to get a full recovery of your data from the 300 Gb drive already re-written.
Your only choice is save some money and send the drive to a reputable DR firm near you.
Otherwise is game over.