hey everyone,

I've been doing some research into data recovery, hard drives, etc...and I'm trying to wrap my head around the whole process. A local company diagnosed my Western Digital 2TB external HD as having a potentially failing or failed head assembly, and said it was common for those drives. They said that a head swap is the next step. So, how does this process work?

1. Find a hard drive to cannibalize for parts
2. Swap the heads assembly
3. ????

After the head assembly is swapped, is the data simply copied onto another hard drive, or is it diagnosed using software, then copied? I'm not sure what the exact process is, and I'm honestly trying to find out because, a. I want to know what would be done to my hard drive if I were to send it to a data recovery place, and b. what do I do if the cost is too much, and I actually dare to attempt it myself? (as for b. I used to work for an engineering company for 6 years and built/tested prototype circuit boards for seismometers, so I know my way around sensitive electronics, but not hard drives.)

Any thoughts, suggestions, etc.? I would appreciate any help!

PS. Based on the HDD guru files, the noise my Western Digital makes is identical to the WD Laptop Clicking mp3.

As long as it is a reputable data recovery lab who quoted a reasonable price $700-1200, you should be able to trust their diagnosis.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Thanks Luke. It's just money that I don't have so I'm trying to inquire if this is something I can a. attempt to do at home, and, b. what are my chances of getting my data back is the 'degraded head assembly' IS the correct diagnosis?

Also, can you shed some light on why the drive needs to be imaged after the head swap vs. just connecting it and reading it as a normal hard drive?

Circa 98% of the drives that have failed mechanically have problems with bad sectors and often firmware problems. This means that after a head swap, though the drive "may read" it will be very unstable. As result, copying files directly will lock the drive up, making it unresponsive and freezing the system. Furthermore, all this fussing around puts tremendous stress on the drive as the host operating system constantly attempts to read the file structure of the drive (which internally constantly ends in failure, further degrading the drive and ultimately whatever new set of donor heads were placed on it.)

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thanks labtech! Some good food for thoughts...

Would you recommend that the drive be imaged afterwards or cloned?

Yes, but not using just some software tool. You really need professional equipment like PC-3000 to tinker with the firmware and stabilize the drive, then a hardware imaging tool to safely extract the data. If you go and just plug a head-swapped drive into a Windows computer you're most likely just going to end up with a second set of failed heads.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Thanks a lot data-medics!

Definitely not planning to just plug and copy. That approach worked many years ago when I got two fried PCBs from a power surge. Luckily, I found a hard drive with the same PCB (and all the subsequent info) and was able to just swap PCBs, copy my data, and discard the hard drives.