Rebuilding a Hard Drive

[XNine]

Okay, I have this old 80 gig HD, the original one out of my Powermac G4. A couple of years ago, my friend dropped it (don't ask) and it has made a clicking sound ever since. Well, a click and then a hum (like it's trying to boot up, then it winds down and clicks again.)

IS it possible that I can pull the board, IO connector, and power connector off of it, and supply ones from another HD to try to get this thing up and running just to get some data off of it?

I jsut tried putting it in an enclosure (Firewire/USB) and it still made these same sounds and would not boot fully to mount.

Lemme know.

Thanks!

 

[killmoms]

Dude, if it's making those sounds it means that the internals of the drive are destroyed, not the external stuff. It's dead, Jim. The only way you'd ever get data off it is to send it to a professional data recovery place, and this doesn't sound like the kind of "mission critical" stuff that would justify the expense incurred for that sort of operation.

 

[bu113t]

I agree, if this data is extremely important to you, send it off... chances are if you pull it apart you're gonna lose everything... If you can live without the contents, I would forget about it, recovery places can get quite expensive...

 

[redeye be]

I think it can be done.
You 'just' have to find the -> exact <- same drive and swap the disks. Succes isn't guaranteed though. I think HD innards are really fragile.

One tip: if you do open them, make the environment as dust free as possible. Maybe do it in your bathroom, after leaving the shower on for half an hour with steaming hot water to clear the dust. And make sure no water gets in the HD...

Let us know how it turns out, if turns out.

Cheers

all of this is speculative and my humble opinion