My hard disk just started making a ticking sound, and then it stopped spinning. I checked the inside and saw that the r/w head is broken.

Can I just move the platter to another hard drive or will it destroy my other drive? Do you have any solution for this? My main goal is to get the data inside the new disk.

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2 Answers

If you have to ask, the answer is, with 99.9% certainty, you will fail.

Opening the hard drive up to see the platters outside of a Clean Room will usually damage the platters enough that the data is not available anymore, with the air and contaminates that are around us.

I'd suggest, if it's not taken apart already, contacting a Data Recovery service, one that offers to tell you what it can recover before shelling out lots of money.

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Opening a drive does not permanently make it unusable. While it's not a particularly great idea, hard drives can function fine even in a disassembled state.

You could swap your platters over to another drive and it would physically work, but in reality the chances of recovering anything yourself are very poor because of electronic compatibility.

Dust, in reality, is a non-issue. Hard drive platters are fairly robust, and a modern drive platter can experience close to 2,000 G of acceleration, which basically clears off any dust that isn't glued to the platter. You can run a drive with the lid removed for days, in an ordinary office, and still be able to read 99.999999% of the disk just fine. If dust does get stuck to the platter, the grease that's causing it to stick there is a bigger problem than the dust itself.

The biggest problem with trying to restore the drive however is electronics compatibility. You would have to find a drive with identical, or near identical model and revision. You would need to also move the PCB, but even then the firmware on each individual drive is calibrated to the specific set of heads it's shipped with. Depending on the drive and firmware, there may be some level of tolerance to the new heads, but the chances of it "just working" without firmware modifications are slim.

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