Hello,
I have several hitachi (dk23bd 20 if that helps) drives that won't spin. I am not interested in getting the data back off of them, so taking them to a specialist isn't even remotely on my mind. I am on more of a learning adventure. I consider these drives foder for experimenting or trash other wise, but if this is a common and fixable thing then I would love to have the drives to play around with. So here is the thing. I have been able to get a few of them to spin up only to have them stop later. I've opened up two of them to see what was going on. The drives are sort of locked up. The head is about 1/3 of the way onto the platters and the platters are not free spinning at this point. I can slowly force them to spin and that moves the head off to the landing area, and then they are unlocked and free spinning again. But if I plug them back in the head goes and parks on the platter again. I haven't opened up the other drives, but they are acting the same as far as I can tell. Is this some sort of locking issue, or maybe firmware issue. Any idea of things I can try? I have a few to experiment on, so any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance

Do you have access to a multimeter? Maybe you could check the components of the PCB and compare the results against a 100% working PCB.