I have a WD 2.5 4GB hard drive that was dropped and the heads moved past the parking clip and destroyed the heads. I found a working donor drive that is the same exact model number as the damaged drive and manufactured within 5 months of my drive. My question is should I just change the head from the donor drive to the patient drive or should I change the platers from the patient to the donor drive and the PCB board from the patient to the donor? Which would have a better chance of working? I am also wondering if I change the platters/PCB board to the donor can I get away without a head comb as the one for this drive is expensive and hard to obtain?

Is it really 4GB you wanted to write or 4TB by any chance? In the latter case :
you should NOT touch any of the internals of this drive, even if you managed to do the swap, without correct tools the chance for successful recovery is close to 0, while the chance to screw the drive up beyond recovery (or close to beyond) is close to 100.
Seek pro help instead, without messing with it on the first place.

if it is 4GB, you may have some hope but still slim without experience.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I have lost several drives over the years from dropping and I have the info backed up. This is more of an experiment to deal with this. I found HDD recovery fascinating. I have watched several videos on utube and with the right precautions it can be done. Risky, certainly but I like risk. knowing all this which method do you think has the greater possibility for success?

You are correct it is a 4TB disk, 5 platters.

I am fascinated with attempting this myself. I have a backup with about 90% of the data on it. I have watched several videos online and it appears that with the right precautions it can be done. Successfully, that is to be seen. Based on this and my original post which method has the best chance for success?

ok, thx for clarifying. You got the answer then.

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

I sent several post explaining why I want to give it a shot but they are not showing up. They are pending moderator approval??

Yup, your msgs arrived finally, put before mine...
I still think i answered. This path is full of tricks and traps and you have one chance. Better play russian roulette with a full barrel

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

That being said it would not be worth the expense of data recovery to get back the 10% of the data I do not have backup. Do you know of where I can find head combs preferably in the US where I can get them w/o huge shipping costs?