Hello and Happy Easter to everyone,
my friend hdd spins up but with strong scratchy noise, then it does head clicking sound, bios detects it with right name after 20 seconds about, then spins down.
After few seconds it spins up alone again and repeats all over again...

The drive is a Barracuda 7200.12 ST31000528AS with firmware CC44, data are not so important for him (just download videos from the net).
Data is not so important for him to justify the high cost for DR recovery, he said he can download everything again...
He told me if i could do something to fix it, i answered that this symptoms is very surely due to a mechanical issue, so i may not able to fix it, but he didn't want to listen it and asked me to open it and at least see what the problem is, the alternative was to thrown it away...

So i opened it and did 2 pics:



Are those scratches?
He said that the drive never fallen or got shacked

Yes, scratches. Surface destroyed, data unrecoverable.

It is possible to recover data on the other platters if i disable the head were are scratches?

I think to disable head on this drive, you would need it to pass initialization first, unless you reprogram the rom itself and change head map in it.
no matter how you look at it tho, Spildit is right, platter dust is everywhere on the inside. Chances are other surfaces are in similar shape.

Ok thank you all.
Just to play with it, someone knows how to reprogram the rom for change the head map?
I have eeprom programmer, so i can dump rom firmware, but i don't know how to reprogram it for head map change.

Un giorno te lo spieghiamo....

I think it is waste of time. Data is unrecoverable.

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Flash Killer - everyday new resources (pinout, XOR, ECC,config) for flash devices

E fai bene.

if dust inside, no way.

Dust makes more scratches when hdd spins.

no way to recover data,