Hello,
As the topic states I have a Maxtor DiamondMax10 250GB PATA133 HD, model #6B250R0060811, that I am looking for someone to work on, here are the details. I received this hard drive with the Smooth chip on the PCB burnt out, it literally caught on fire. I searched for a donor drive and was able to find one with the *exact* same firmware revision as this drive in order to do a PCB swap. I tried to replace the PCB but the BIOS only recognizes it as a Maxtor SABRE of 0GB. Also, the drive will make a noise of 3 alternating tones (this is not a hard drive noise) that are some sort of alarm when the PCB swap was done. I tried this also "live" by putting the good donor drive into a machine, putting it to sleep, and then removing the PCB and sticking it on the problem drive, all to no avail. I decided to send this to a data recovery company that I knew of as I didn't want to attempt a multi platter swap myself as I don't feel I have enough experience and they too were unsuccessful. The reasons they stated was that in addition to the PCB being burnt the motor was bad inside (the head) so the hard drive needed to get a platter swap. However, there is a bracket between the platters and it can not be removed because you would have to remove the platters and it is impossible to keep the platters aligned. These are their words, not mine. I have attached two pictures of the bracket to which they are referring that they took when it was in their clean room. The data recovery company said that they thought that only Seagate's own data recovery service would be able to do the data recovery because of this bracket's placement.
I am posting this to ask for a second opinion. I have called Seagate and the amount of money they want to charge is absolutely out of my price range (over 1K). I have this drive along with the donor drive and an external drive to copy the data to in the event of success. I have been reading this board for over a year and know that many people in the data recovery business come on here to share information and ideas, as such I am reaching out to you. I am located in the United States but am not unwilling to send the drive out of the country as long as I know the person I am sending it to is reputable. Please let me know if you think this bracket issue can be surmounted and a place that you could recommend I send it to or a ballpark figure of what you might charge to tackle this problem. Thank you all for your time.

"over 1k" seems to me as a bargain for this failure. An 800 EUR+ plus VAT estimate is quite usual for HDDs that can be recovered >99% just by imaging intelligently or PCB swapping in the worst case. As soon as they need the clean room not just for making sure nothing is really wrong inside the HDA, they'll charge 3-5kEUR here.

Midden,

If the motor is simply shorted out, but not mechanically binding, I think I can help you. If the motor is frozen, that is an entirely different matter . . .

I have developed and machined a tool to spin the platters without having to remove them. However, I have not taken the time to test it, so I don't (yet) know how well it works.

I will try it out on a similar drive. If it works, I'll let you know. My charges are far less than the other sources you cited. I'll PM you my website and contact info.

Jon

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