Of my current swathe of drives in the lab with physical damage or failure, I've got a few that appear to have taken platter damage when the original heads failed. My main challenge in DR generally is finding suitable donor drives - ironically, this is something I've managed for all three drives here, only to find platter damage prior to performing the work!

I've opened each of them prior to performing head swaps and have found what you see below:

Hitachi 2.5" HTS725050A9A364:


WD 3.5" WD10EARS-00MVWB0:


WD 3.5" WD5000AAKS-00TMA0:


I haven't purchased a donor for the Hitachi yet. I happened to have a suitably-matching donor for each of the WD drives from my own drive pool here. Now, I decided to take the gamble and did perform the head swap on the WD5000AAKS but had the same symptoms with the new heads (won't read SA, spins down after 3 attempts). Re-examining the drive afterwards doesn't show any further observable damage, but I'm thinking this one is probably not recoverable. Returning the donor heads to the donor chassis showed the heads were toast, with both drives now showing the same symptom.

In the past I've made the call that drives with such platter damage are simply not recoverable (and my experience with the AAKS would seem to support this), however before I blow my other donor drives away on a pointless exercise I thought I might ask the opinion of some of you who have more experience than me.

What are your thoughts on the first two drives here? Worth attempting a transplant? Thanks all.

If scratches are only on the edge, recovery should not be a big problem.

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I would give the Hitachi a go. The EARS concerns me as the damage does not follow the line of head movement, it's not linear. Did the client open the drive and damage it? If your head swap process was good on the AAKS and the heads are now dead when put back into the donor then there's media damage on the patient.

With experience you'll be able to judge which jobs are not even worth trying, and which are worth the risk.

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I agree with arvika. It seems to me AAKS should be recoverable. Maybe there is hidden media damage on lower platters. EARS and Hitachi would be more difficult.

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Thanks guys, I'll let you know how we go with the AAKS and Hitachi (the latter of which I know I'm generally excellent with - here's hoping this is the same). I was the second recovery company to get the EARS, so unknown history there. Thanks for your thoughts!