I think I would like to attempt swapping platters. My family HDD with pictures and videos spins up and clicks. The drive is in a Maxtor One Touch box > Seagate 9fz136-569 Firmware SD35. Please let me know if you have available a suitable HDD for swapping in the platters.

Swapping platters on a clicking model drive like yours is the wrong approach. Do not tamper with the platters. If you absolutely can't send it to a specialist, then I highly recommend that you do not rush into doing anything. Study drive architecture, understand how it works, study failures and execute correct solution, determine compatibility between drives, study the tools necessary to execute the solution, practice several times on same/similar drive until perfecting the plan. This is half the battle.

The other half is basically more or less a need of super lack where the drive would work flawlessly, which virtually never happens. As result, there is need of advanced tools to be able to maximize the chances of data recovery.

Needless to say, the first step always is to ensure the failure is diagnosed correctly. So, this is what needs most clarification to begin with.

EBay should have plenty of options.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

If the data is important to you we would recommend you taking it to data recovery place. It is better to replace R/W rather than platters

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