Granted I've not performed but just a handful of head replacements, but I've thoroughly enjoyed reading through the forums here. The question I have is that it seems a lot of time and resources are poured into diagnosing problems with drives when the problem could have "simply" been resolved by a head swap. I understand the difficulty in finding a good donar match but once a proper parts drive is found a head swap isn't rocket science to perform. Heck, I don't even have a clean room and I've never had a head swap go bad (except for my *experiments* of course

Am I over simplifying this or just overlooking something? I can't count the number of solutions I've read through here that have fallen into a category of either a PCB replacement or a head swap. Sprinkle in the Seagate BSY bug and proper software imaging and it seems to me that 98% of all data recovery falls into one of these groups.

Sure, its just like being a doctor... 98% of all patients either need some medicine or surgery, right?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I take it your point is that doing a head swap on a drive that happens to fall into the 2% category could likely kill the drive. Gotcha. I figured I was over-simplifying it.

No, my point is that if you had a magical diagnostic machine that would tell you with 100% accuracy that a head swap was required, and a magical head-swap machine that would instantly and automatically generate a set of perfectly compatible heads, install them perfectly, and automatically resolve any other issues (alignment, media damage, etc) that might interfere with the process, then sure, it would be simple.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.