Let's say I have a hard drive with a bad head, which is interfering with other heads. Let's say I don't care about the data on the platter that's read with that bad head. Could I just cut off that bad head, and use the rest to get my data? As in, would it work fine if it's missing a head, or would that interfere with normal operation?

Thanks for any help.

You can do it but it requires special tools like pc3k.

You can not take snips and cut off this head it has to be disabled in a utility like Ramzeez said with PC3K or other tools that can work in the SA and do this one for you

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Iorana Haraharaini

Rameez is correct.

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Great, thanks.

Not only that, but data is usually stored in blocks/zones that encompass all surfaces. So unless you want a lot of holes in the data you will need to copy the data from all heads. You may be lucky if you are only after a few files, but Murphy's law says different

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If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

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I have to agree w/ the rest of the people here, you can only "disable" a head via special data recovery hardware/software.

But let's pretend that you could theoretically cut off a bad head w/ some snips.

You would need to do this in a cleanbox/cleanroom to prevent contaminants entering your hard drive.
You would need to carefully remove the entire head assembly.
You would snip the bad head off
You would need to reinstall it all and hope it worked.
You would hope it wasn't a Western Digital w/ the $%@#*@ alignment screw. God I hate those.

Easy question to answer. Install a HSA that has one head less than it should. Does the drive still work?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

in general, usually no.

Maybe modification of head configuration and head mapping in certain families will help, but again specialist tools will be required

Remove ONE head on 2-head VCR or ONE on 4 head VCR and see if you get half image or 1/4 of image on screen

a) What Scratchy said is critical: data is stored on all disk surfaces and there's no way for you to know that some of your data doesn't reside under the bad head.
b) You wouldn't have to cut the bad head off physically if you had the requisite software tools to disable the head in ROM. However, a bad head will frequently not allow the drive to start up properly at all. So whether you cut it off or not you're still not going to be able to access the data.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Why stop there ST? Just take the head from the VCR and use it in place of the bad one!!

Exactly

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.