hard drive repair parts

this seems to be more difficult than i thought it would be. i'm looking for a place that sells hard drive parts - more specifically, the read/write heads assembly. i dropped my portable drive and upon inspection, one of the heads fell out. would anyone know of any place?

 

easiest way and usually the cheapest, get a drive with matching heads and swap them out. and if a head fell off there is a very good chance of a scratched platter ... unless you REALLY need the data dont bother.

secondly do you have the equipment and platter removal tools to do a head swap?

 

i gave up searching for parts and ordered the exact same drive - hoping to do what you suggested.

to answer the second part: probably not, but i'm going to give it a shot. i know these things are delicate and i have some tiny tools, but i really don't know if i'm going to be successful, or not.

there is a gap between the read/write arm and the platters. would it be easier to swap the platters into the new drive? or the heads into the old drive?

 

in that drive I am guessing you are better off moving the arm assembly to to the old drive, without alignment and removal tools a platter change is nearly impossible to do well.

if you can give me the model number I can look it up in my repair guides.

 

Seagate Momentus 5400.4 250GB ST9250827AS

 

swap the head assembly and be VERY careful to not touch the platter edges. you should also worry about dust. I am assuming you do not have a cleanroom or a laminar flow bench so once you have the heads in and adjusted up, spin up the drive and attempt to retrieve the data and move data to a THIRD drive as the lifespan of any opened drive will be drastically reduced without the cleanroom or lam bench.

here is a link to some of the tools I use for swapping heads and platters, there is a little info there if you want to look

http://www.hdrconline.com/read-write-head-tool.php

 

well, i swapped the heads and this is what i get.



and ideas? i tried swapping the circuit boards, too, but it was a no go...

 

:confused2:

Were you walking around with the cover off when one of the heads fell out?

 

ha ha, no. i dropped the drive while it was in use. i couldn't hear the platter spin, so i took it apart and one of the heads was laying in the bottom of the case. i ordered another drive, just like it and swapped the heads, and now i get the video above.

 

What Kevin was too nice to say is that your drive is almost assuredly toast. Unless the data on there is of life-altering significance - and if it is, you should have another copy of it or be prepared to spend a few k on real data recovery - throwing more money at this is pointless.

 

this was my backup, of my old laptop that died. therefore, it's the only copy. i was in the process of copying to my new laptop when it fell. it's not worth a few thousand to try to recover, but it took a lot of time to acquire - especially my itunes library...

i certainly don't think i was 'throwing' money at this. i honestly thought it was worth a shot. i do understand what you are saying, though.

 

Yeah, what I meant was that replacing the head of the drive was never going to be an option to just randomly do at home - putting more money into this is just being wasteful.

If you send Apple an email, you're usually allowed to redownload iTunes content once. You might try that.

 

By opening it you are pretty much guaranteed that its destroyed. By opening it you exposed it to dust and all the other stuff in the air and there is no way that you are gonna fix it. Especially since the head fell off. Just move get a new one and remember to backup in the future.

 

This IS his backup. His laptop died and he was in the process of restoring from the backup on this drive when it was damaged. He obviously has been backing up his data.