Okay, so my first idea was to repair a 200gb Hitachi drive with broken IDE pins.
That's not going to happen at this point.

Rather than throw away (recycle) the drive, is there a way to safely erase the data on a drive when you can't actually access it with a pc?

I'm thinking a degausser or bulk eraser or something. Would that kill the mechanisms as well?

I just figure if someone can get some use out of the working platters, it's wasteful to toss it out.

If you want to save platters, remove the ROM chip or the entire PCB would make it very difficult to recover. Only a real pro would be able to get the data and who would go through all that trouble?

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$300 Data Recovery - Los Angeles Data Recovery

Agree just get rid of your PCB or remove your ROM there is a lot of way to destroy your drive. I saw this one where someone drilled holes in it with a drill, others were burned with heat guns to remove paint. So if you want just destroy it this way and nobody would actually want to take any tmie at all to repair it.

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Iorana Haraharaini

You could just donate the drive to your local data recovery lab in exchange for their wiping the drive for you. You get the peace of mind and they get the spare parts.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

In total agreement with this. I admire your eco-friendliness frankly. I think most people would just take a hammer to the drive just for little bit of smash 'em up fun.

Not saying that I would do such a thing, of course.

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Nationwide data recovery services for RAID servers and laptops - http://www.harddriverecovery.org/

Good suggestion. I'll have to do some research and see if I can find someone in south Florida.

That would seem to be a simple 1/2 hour job. Why are we trashing this again?

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Quasimodo is in Florida if you want contact him and send it to him.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Several IDE pins are destroyed and no replacement PCB has been found.

Well, just replace the pins/connector on the original PCB. What's hard about that? What am I missing here?

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

From what it seems like in his origianl post he does not know how or can not do it. But if there was a PCB he could find he can move over NVRAM and read the HDD again and get off his data. But on the second hand seems like data is not that important to him and he can give the drive to a DR company to use some good parts from it.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Even without a PCB if data was not erased, if the drive comes to someone like a real professional, it would be just a matter of time to get data (however there should be a valid reason to try to get data).
To live in perfect relax and at least cut off all the possible leak of data because of normal, average joe "Wile E. Coyote-ish" attempts :
Solution #0 : keep the drive.
Solution #1 : make it connect some way to a PC and erase the HDA or re-use the drive... - MHDD "SECURE ERASE" function should be sufficient.
Solution #2 : repair the PCB and re-use it !