My wife's Toshiba took a 2' tumble and the HDD died. Hitachi HTS541680J9SA00. SATA 2.5" 80GB. It's a personal computer and the time to backup is a couple of months so recovery is not mission-critical, but nice to have.

The machine boots off another disk and the disk is dead in another machine. On opening, the heads were mid disk and there is minor damage to the visible side of the platter at that point as well as several randomly-spaced "pits" over the disk, all visible at 10× mag. At the same mag., there is no visible head damage.

After parking the heads by spinning the platter and using gravity, the disk now performs mechanically (I think: not 100% certain that the platter is spinning) and clicks like a trouper (so I assume the heads suffered stiction before). There is no incremental damage to the platter on spinning the disk, at least on the visible side. But it is completely invisible in MHDD, Linux and the BIOS. I would naturally like to use MHDD to poke around for example to find out if the heads or Sector 0 are the core problem but obviously cannot.

A donor and a replacement disk are on the way. What looks simplest is to swap the platter out to the donor but I guess that is a long-odds game, particularly flying blind. Any ideas how to get a look at the disk in MHDD?

Thanks
wp

Repair the disk, then MHDD will be able to help. If the data is important you should send it to a pro as you clearly have little knowledge regarding data recovery. The data is probably not recoverable.

Well thank you for that. Any ideas who I should send it to to have non-mission critical data not recovered and how much it might cost? Maybe you can post a quote here: I think you have all the details you need.

Where are you located?

London. This is not a critical recovery, but a project and a learning experience. Just looking for some tips on how to fire up MHDD. I guess the electronics were fired by transients so swapping the platter to a donor looks like the best bet.

It's fine to tinker, but if you have any interest in actually recovering anything, swap the heads instead of the platter. If you want to triple your chances of success (From 5% to 15%), get a junk drive and practice the maneuver first.

Electronics likely weren't fried from a drop, but if you get a donor, trying the PCB first probably wouldn't hurt.

I'd forget MHDD. It's not going to show you what the drive looks like physically. If you fix the drive, MHDD will then work, but you won't need MHDD then.

In case I didn't mention it, MHDD is a nice diagnostic program, but it can't fix physical problems. It's already done it's job. It told you MHDD can't see the drive. You can safely stow away your copy of MHDD until the next drive failure.

Thanks rchadwick: exactly what I was looking for: I appreciate it and agree your odds assessment. I'll let you know how I get on.