I have a couple of these drives, one of them is not recognised when powered on. The startup fails, a couple of click-clack after the drive spins on, then a little increase in the rotational speed and nothing more. I'm thinking to use the working donor drive to attempt a recovery of the bad one. The PCB of the not working drive works when transplanted on the working one. This suggests me that the PCB is not faulty. In fact if instead I use the PCB of the good drive installed on the failing one, the situation is unchanged. No initial calibration like with the native PCB.
I was thinking about head stack transplanting. What's your opinion about a failure of the preamplification SMD chip installed on the connection flat toward the heads? Is it better trying a change of the chip instead of the all head stack assembly? Being a single platter, dual head disk, perhaps there is high success rate even with a complete transplant of the head stack assembly. Any suggestion or statistics about this kind of disk and their related most probable failure reason? I don't have software/hardware tools to check for firmware corruption, and I'm only interested in the recovery of the data. Even if the drive works for half an hour it would be enough to get the useful data from it.
Any help is welcome. I have 2 GB of pictures on the drive, and I can't afford the costs of data recovery service.
Mirko.

Hi,

it is a one headed model, I have very high success rate with MHA transplantation in this model.
In the larger models (40,60,80 G) the donor MHA is highly probably won't be compatible, I always had to align it a bit.
But with this 20G model it shouldn't be a problem:)

regards,
pepe

Hi Pepe,

I have the same problems with my Maxtor D540-4k 80GB harddrive. I'm also thinking about Head Stack Transplant. My question is can I transplant a good head stack from a D540-4K 40GB drive to this 80GB drive? Does it have to be identical size for Head Stack Transplant?
Thanks,

bcj

Hello,

40G models have 2 heads, while 80G models have 4. So doesn't seem to be working, does it?

regards,
pepe