I can't pay for a professional recovery of my wd3200bpvt.
What can give me more possibility to successfully recover my drive?
Swap the heads o the single platter of the drive?
Which one on your experience is the easier with homemade tools?
Does anyone know if there are problems on head alignment or special torque to be used?
I'll train myself on a old death drive to be sure to minimize the errors.

Thank you

Full story:
One day my pc freezed suddently without receving any smart warning in past.
Rebooted and noticied a strange sound. Not the death click. Like trying to read continuosly a zone unsuccessfully.
So rebooted in total 3-4 times and only sometimes get recognized by bios.
I've tryed to make a full copy with ddrescue before the fulll death but failed. copied the first 3MB of the disk, then the drive stop responding.
I'm not able anymore to access data, and the bios doesn't recognize the drive.
I'm investigating the problem with free tool like wdr (any other?).
I think the head crashed so, i'm investigating the better way to operate: head or single platter swap.

If you are 100% intent on doing this yourself, be prepared that you may cause further damage to the drive to the point of permanent unrecoverability. So the risk of permanent data loss is 100% on you.

But I would never touch the platter. Head swap is your best option.

But honestly finding out what exactly is the main problem should be first. Because there is a chance it may not be a head issue.

I would find a local reputable DR company to do a free evaluation first on the drive.

Contacted the companies listed on WD website, and can't effort the price.
So, it's worth a try by myself to carve anything possible.
I've a 6 month backup and recovered almost all the useful and important data so if I fail, never mind.

Thank you for your suggestion. If it seems to be an head problem, i'll try only an head swap.

In this phase i'm keeping the drive off and reading all the useful thinks on internet, but still impossible to understand what's the problem. The drive make a noise that i can't identify with the help of audio and video explaining the usual hard disk problem.
It spin, to full speed without problem. Then i can hear the head moving, and after a second it start doing strange sound, a rattle and the bios doesn't recognize it. It never click.
On the few boot, when bios recognized it, and the drive didn't make any strange noise. When tryed to read some data, it started to make the noise and stopped to be responsive.

Any idea?

Bad heads 99%, and possible platter damage ( Scratches)

That would be my guess

Thank you for your suggestions

your going to need the right tool for anything like a headswap or platter swap
no tools your going to 100% damaged your data

I think that 99% my operation could be a complete fail.
But i can't effort a professional recovery and i have a 6 month old backup.
I can give it a try without expecting too much.