HDD failure

[bergin]

folks,
Typical scenario here, friend came to me recently with a failed 3.5 drive with all his wife accounts and pictures of their newborn child, and guess what no backup. So eager to see what i could do i opend the drive and could quickly see that the tip of one of the drive heads was damaged.
What is the best couse of action to take here. platters look pristine. I presume the best way is to get an eact match of drive and replace the head. saw a vid on YT it look easy enough once you have the right equipment. What other options do i have here. I have countless guinea pig drives to use in order to resolve, but they are all of different brand and model, so prob useless to me. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

thanks
Brian

[Cleanroom]

1. What is the model of the drive?
2. How important is the data to your friend?
3. Are you willing to take responsibility for the drive being completely unrecoverable if you botch up the recovery?
4. Just swapping heads is never as easy as it looks on youtube, even if you have all the tools needed. It looks easy to just swap out a liver, or kidney, but much more difficult in reality.

In all honesty I have a feeling that your friend would pay to have this done professionally. I would not risk it unless you friend is 100% aware of what could go wrong. There are things that can happen that can cause the drive to be unrecoverable by any means.

Value your friendship and refer to a pro....

Good luck

[BlackST]

Did you see the "HAPPY END" on the YT video , I mean the drive successfully recognised AND data back ?

So said, I second what Cleanroom said.

[northwind]

I third what Cleanroom said, and just to add it up, expect to have more trouble now that you've opened the drive in a non-clean environment.