I have one of these drives and after unscrewing two screws on the preamp module it wouldn't budge.

I see that the flexible cable appears to be loosely connected.

What is the trick to removing MHA on this drive? Is it to remove the flexible cable from the black base?

I attached a picture where you can see 2 screws (and those damned plastic spacers...) and the triangle connector. Is there a screw under the barcode sticker?

Thanks

I would recommend removing the PCB first. There is a screw from the other side that attaches the connector through the PCB. Then there is a rubber seal that is a little difficult to get off but isn't too bad.

Now thats funny!

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Just don't forget to check that there is only one gasket when you replace it! Doh!!

Yes u need to remove screw under the PCB from the preamp flex cable to the PCB, if u dont do that and tried to lift up, could broken up

try to make it broken. hehe......

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data recovery service[/b]

The "trick" is that most people send their hard drives to a professional.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

I think that's why he only charges a $200 flat fee. I suspect his video had all kinds of gems in it, but I stopped watching after seeing him sit on a couch, waving around customer's drives like they were trading cards.

Quotes from the movie at www.harddiskcrashed.com

"99.99% of all hard drives do not need to be opened to recover the data"

"In most cases we can give the drive back in a precrashed condition"

"I tend to know just about everything"

"You need a high torque screwdrive to remove the drive from the laptop, dont try it yourself"

PS: Please lose the funeral music and shave. God that was a slap in the face to watch.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

The first thing that occurred to me... If you don't want to look like a guy working out of his living room, why would you record a 10 minute business video in your living room? Well, at least there's truth in advertising

Thanks for the advice! These things are like puzzle boxes with such gems as my "beloved" T6 screw on the side of a Hitachi headstack next to a powerful magnet. I will look into this further tomorrow. I am familiar with other species of Seagate, but not with this particular one. I already saved its firmware (for the most part, 2 modules unreadable, donor's firmware is perfect, of course), dumped its ROM, identified the cause as potentially bad heads, and see no scratches on the surface or any traces in the filter. Should be a fairly simple 6-head MHA swap. It's part of an external RAID0 stripe, so the donor is identical in every way.

I had a choice - take one of my working 7200.10 drives apart to figure out how to remove the preamp module or ask the experts who have already done that. Thanks for the help.

For the record, I do prefer truth in advertising. I don't have a problem charging a relatively low fee for a straight image job that requires literally 5 minutes of my attention. Besides, that fee is going up once I reach certain targets. I view it as a loss leader item that just happens to be profitable. My fees for firmware recovery and physical recovery are probably in-line with yours. I usually get those clients signed on a broad support agreement valued at several thousand dollars annually to ensure they don't go through the agony of no support again. I do refuse certain projects if they look like they'll need equipment and/or skills that I do not yet possess.

My clean bench is located off-site several miles away. Though I could operate an office, I prefer not to have an extra $2000/mo in expenses for an office that only serves to create an image of a larger company. There are better ways to market a business. That money is much better spent on tools, training, R&D, and marketing. If you had that opportunity to slash your costs, would you not take it?

I also appreciate the movie review. You, of course, do realize that the data on those drives has long since been recovered and they are from my donor stack. I could just as easily point to a stack, but that's boring. The video is not my best work (for one thing, my camera needs its heads replaced, hence the annoying dropouts, so it's in the shop), but it does the job exactly as intended. What's important is that my customers are happy. It's far more powerful to have a customer's reference on video than as text.

Make sure you clone the 'good' part of the the raid before you canibalise it.

*laugh*...

What do I do first? Backup firmware, backup ROM, get a sector copy of the drive onto either a blank drive or MHDD erased drive, verify the clone. I never ever work without a sector level backup.

not required. just remove platters one by one and place them in a fridge. This will keep them safe and nice and cool.

Forget that... Liquid N2

This forum is going to result in some very eager and desperate people doing some very silly things to try recover lost data, because 'they read about it in hddguru'!!

Right... so to keep data safe...

Most of this thread is a joke. Do not even think about doing anything to a drive without a sector-level backup. If the drive can't be imaged, send it to a data recovery company. Your drive hates being refrigerated!

Maybe you should stick to r-studio and dd_rescue. Looks like everything else is a little out of your comfort zone

Put the hard drive down, step away from your computer.
Go outside, become a shepard.

I agree and I have to say something. I came to this forum because I heard that it was one of the "premier" forums in our field. Instead most of what I've found so far has been mockery and degrading of forum users by people who are only here to drum up work for their companies. I say that because if the people who are on here are supposed to be gurus they should just answer questions with the realization that most of the people come on here for help and aren't trying to be smart asses or stupid. If they don't want to give out help then they shouldn't be on any forums but their own. Prime example is this poster. If he is lacking such a base knowledge that he doesn't know there is a screw holding that particular piece down then I don't feel like I have anything to worry about when it comes to him as far as competition. I will gladly tell him that there is a screw holding it down. He's not on my level and I'm not holding it against him. I'll still get business and more than likely HIS. If I were the moderator of this forum site I would not only be embarrassed by some of the comments of the "locals" but I would put a stop to it. I realize that some people get on here and ask jackass questions but that should be handled by the moderator or moderators of this forum and not "flaming" them.

I urge everyone on this forum not to continue to allow this site to go further in the "dumps". There are many, many smart people on this site with valuable knowledge and I for one am here to increase mine and help others. We have a role. If a "new" user asks a question that we've already answered millions of times then he or she needs to be pointed to the link and warned. After 3 times ban the user. I also realize that half of the time people are joking but just like hddguy said, if we continue to post stupid things people will do them. If you tell a person who doesn't know anything about gravity to jump off of a building you should feel guilty because you were ignorant enough to pass on bad knowledge. I'm by no means condoning ignorance or stupidity but at what point does a reply lower you to the same as the ignorant person? I didn't come here to read 10 million f'ing funny posts on sticking your drive in the refrigerator.