I have an old hard drive (PATA) from an 2003ish Toshiba laptop. The motherboard crashed in 2010 so I removed the hard drive and I've had it since. It's the only hard drive that has my honeymoon pictures on it. As far as I knew, the HD was still fine.  I bought a SATA/PATA/IDE to USB interface cable and hooked it up yesterday. It looked like it was going to work then stopped. The hard drive had a little bit of a click but it didnt seem like a typical death click. Anyhow, after several attempts to dock the HD with the computer failed I took the cover off the HD and the platter has a nice scratch near the middle of it. The heads are damaged I guess. Is my old HD fubar or could I transplant a set of heads and possibly still access at least some of the data on the drive?

 

My guess is you're out of luck.  Drive head->platter tolerances and geometry are extraordinarily precise; probably not something you're going to be able to reproduce on a garage workbench.  They also operate in a sterile, dust-free environment which you compromised when you popped open the drive cover, and dust particles will wreak havoc between the heads and platter if you can even get the thing to spin back up.

Depending on how valuable the pictures are to you, there are data recovery services out there that may be able to get at least some of it back for you.  But it ain't cheap.

Taking the cover off pretty much guarantees that you won't be recovering anything. You might be able to get something recovered if you paid a professional.

I'm a maintenance tech at a gov't facillity. We have a clean room and the proper tools which is where this was done. We just don't have anyone here who specializes in computers and I'm not a bench tech (we are all PLC guys). It's not a big deal if I don't recover the pictures, we have plenty that were uploaded to FB and photobucket. Taking the cover off was more of a last ditch resort and come to find out the head(s) are jacked up along with the platter.


 

Disregard, then.

 

It's alright, I just didn't want y'all getting the idea that I had literally no clue as to what I was doing

 

It takes more than just a clean room.  As was said the positioning is highly precise and you have to have a lot of special tools to do the alignment.  You want those pictures back, you're going to have to pay for data recovery.

I decided to not screw with it anymore. The pics will die with the HD.