hi guys. i have a maxtor diamondmax 21 s/n: STM3250310AS it's a clients drive that was giving trouble. it would come up in the bios, but would hang everything. I ran MHDD on the suspicion it being a logical error, MHDD ran through the scan with a 10 uncr errors but lot's of sector blocks greater than 500ms. so after trying MTL it came up recalculating partition block size and then i was able to view the drives. on trying to reverse clone the drive it gave me read errors from the start. eventually running r-studio emergency i was able to start imaging the drive. i never came to the conclusion yet that it could possibly be a head stack issue as the full system area could be read as well as sector size and where the partition starts and ends, everything! about 1 gig it seems into the image the drive failed it took 8 hours to do 650 mb of data. now i have the click of death. Looking back maybe one of the heads where bad, so now i need a stack replacement. unfortunately i don't have a donor drive except for a seagate baracuda 7200.10 s/n: 5RY02H3F. The drives look almost identical and i know i would not beable to use the pcb and platters, but the head stack looks identical. the code on the head is TCB-B on the maxtor and TCBA-C on the seagate. would the stacks be totally different? or would i be better of trying to find a donor drive? thanks for any advice in advance.

juan

Before everything else check for media damage or you will kill any new headstack. Just to save time and money on parts....
Note : weak heads is different from killed heads but the symptom may be the same. You should check thoroughly the ability to read of each head and see exactly what is going on. Have rescued without head swapping a lot of furiously clicking drives where the problem could be circumvented but every case is in a class by itself, and beside "tweaking", everything depends on imaging strategy and the equipment used. Unfortunately I should make some analysis on what comes out from the headstack to tell you . What happens now at startup ?

i have opened the drive and see no damage to the actual platters. filters still look good nothing that i can see that show any signs of physical damage. possible damage to preamp maybe also a issue?

Rare, but can be. I would exclude it if the drive is reading properly.
I assume you have checked ALL the surfaces.
You can also check heads separately with a microscope and/or see if cleaning works.

Side note : was by a chance the drive dropped AND / OR you see sign of servo loss at startup ?

that's what was so weird for me. given the drive would hang badly. but it obviously read the system area well as i got sector size, serial, firmware, total sectors as well as a partition table. but it read really really slowly before it gave up like i said greater than 500 ms in MHDD. surely if it were pcb/firmware it would of clicked from the start? It image 60 gig of the drive but all of it except for about 700 mb where read-errors when the drive failed. and in the image i could see some files including a MFT structure. then it failed and now clicks. i'm very new to data recovery but that's what my logic dictates, possible headstack... i don't know learn something new everyday.

you need dedicated equipment...

what dedicated equipment? deepspar? pc3000? i have done headstack replacements on 2.5 inch drives successfully already, was just wandering what the advice could be given if i'm missing something. it's the only way i can learn.

A comprehensive HW diagnostic can give EASILY (it is possible in other way but it's more difficult and tricky) some info you need before opening the drive, and also you can perform some non-invasive tests.
Other instruments that can help are a DDA but it's a "self wound" due to the price (for me it paid itself in a relatively short time but for my area of interest is different).

thank you for your insight Blackst. i really would like to invest in a DDA and in the process of aquiring a DeepSpar imager. For now it's a hobby that i'm very interested in, i am reading up as much as i can on recovery, but where i'm from there is not much info on the subject. i have recovered quite a few drives for friends with a 80% success rate " drives mostly on 2.5". i need more info on diagnostics and basic equipment needed for basic diagnostics, obviously in depth will be very pricey. so any help will be good, even if you pm me info. what about the headstack on the seagate drive would there be a possibility of using it in the maxtor. how different would the workings be if they look identicle? would the preamp be different seen as though it's the same company surely not much would change?

I can't help you more than this, it's beyond what I am allowed to do. It's a long story... (yes, would have been different if it was B2B....)

P.S. DDA = Digital Data Analyzer. Look at Agilent or LeCroy.

i completely understand... thank you. i did know what a DDA is. LOL very expensive equipment for a DR Hobbylist. once again thank you and i'll patrol the net to see if someone does have a answer.