Hi there!

I have a defective HDD from the mentioned type. The motor is defective.
I have a clean room in my office (more a special container....)

As I currently "play" with the drive I have a question regarding the parking for the heads:
Most drives park theire heads near the spindel - or on a ramp outside. From what i can see is that the heads ar nearly in the middle of the platters. Is that the correct position for that kind of drive? From browsing around I read something about that but I'm not really sure.

Maybe anyone in here has opened a Seagate ST3500630AS or Barracuda 7200.10 and can tell me?
The next thing I want to do is try to change the platters to a spare drive I dont need anymore. Will see if I buy some tools to play around with

No, that is not the proper position for any drive. Most likely the heads didn't make it back to the center when it powered off one time (which is where they belong on a 7200.10). It's unlikely that the motor failed, more likely the heads are now stuck to the platters and preventing it from spinning. Or the center bearing is seized.

If the data is important, you'll want a pro to handle it. If if isn't that important you can try turning the platters counter clockwise in your "clean room" and try to re-seat the heads where they belong after you get it turning. If they won't turn the bearing is seized and you will definitely need a professional to do it (or be willing to invest in a lot of tools $$$).

Platter swapping it yourself is 100% guaranteed to make it un-recoverable forever. Trust me, even the pro's almost never platter swap because it's too risky even with proper tools. We actually resort to changing bearings in place instead.

But it will most likely need new heads in any event, which is not a DIY repair.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Hey data-medics, thanks a lot for your reply. The clean room is really a clean room (we need this for our students, criminal investigation education...).
The disk was not spinning but I was able to get it turn again (without touching the platter).
Unfortunately the force to spin it is way to high, so the motor is not able to do this.

What I heard for the first time is that you do not change platters but change bearings - how do you do that without removing the platters since the motor is UNDER these? You have to remove the platters in either way, don't ?

You work at a data recovery company (or maybe it's your own company) - if the drive has some dust on it - is that a 100% data loss too or would you try to clean it (using clean air or something else? )

The data is not that important since I have a good backup (at least just a few weeks old i think...) - I'm just curious. Once I had a defective drive and send it to a recovery company - and they said nothing could be restored. Had to pay around 400€ for nothing (bad).

Do you even try to recover data if the drive was openend by someone else? Would be interesting to get a price qoute for that. If you would be able to revoer data from that drive (substantial amount) - sounds interesting.

The DIY-Tools are around 500€ (for examle from Dolphin Tools), never read if someone was able to use these cause the forum is for costumers only.

Okay, leanrd another option - replace bearing without removal of platters... Took me some time to find that but I think you would take an approach with that kind of tools?

http://www.hddsurgery.com/tool/hdds-spi ... 7200-10-11

Quite a price (more than I have to play around with.. 500€ os fine but thats 2500
One question I have regarding this tool - if the motor itself is burned - replacing the spindel itself wouldn't help, correct?
And in one of the comments a user writes that the platterns can move back and forward on the spindle, I thought that the platterns are fixed and can not move in either direction (or is he mentioning that they could move using that kind of tool, instead of a plattern tool that keeps them aligned)...

It won't apply in your case, but just FYI ...

Seagate Barracuda IV: wedging bearing:
http://www.acelab.ru/dep.pc/pc.tech.sup ... cuda4.html

English translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... cuda4.html

Have you moved the headstack to the landing area? BTW, you must rotate the platters in the correct direction, otherwise you will rip the sliders off.

See http://www.mediafire.com/download/cvo59 ... k_head.zip

http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=622

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

That drive is not easy to work with platters, it's kinda picky about platters position
I would still go after replacing platters rather than replacing bearings.
But this job is for real DR professionals, who done such a job successfully many times before. Such guys are not easy to find and the prices you would probably consider as astronomical.

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Well to open the drive from the bottom looks interesting (altough all the material flying around will be a mess....)
"Astronomical" ? Well I charge around 800€/day for my work - my customers pay *gg*
I think a professionell in the DR buisness who can help to recover from data loss is more than worth that money and I honor the work they do (altough both times I used professionell services not a single bit of data was restored, and one was the "Number 1 Company" that time (almost forget about that, about 10 years ago...)

I know all this DR stuff is "for professionell in the DR buisness" only - but

a) everyone started as a beginner in his or her job (same for me when I first started in IT, and I''m in that buisness for about 20 years now...)
b) I have a hell of material to play around with in my office, mostly 40/80 gig Harddrives from old workstations which no one will EVER use again
c) a budget of around 500 bucks to buy equiment
d) enough spare time

Okay, back to my "beloved Seagate" -> I put that drive away for some time and play with two easier drives instead. But I will definetly try to get that Seagate working in the future....
The heads have to be replaced I think so I can move them outside the platters by rotating the drive counterclockwise and "gently" moving the heads. Maybe I order a head comp first but I think they are dead anyway and the donor drives heads are fine (until now *gg*)

http://hddsurgery.com/

See the manuals, animations, and video guides at the bottom of the home page.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.