Hard drive clicking, banging against inside spindle

I have a major problem I need to take care of. All the data recovery places make no garuntee of recovery of any data and charge a S$%T load of money. I am capable of taking apart the hard drive and doing the work needed. I've been playing around with the insides of broken drives for a couple years but never needed to fix one.

here is a link to showing what the hard drive is doing:

Hard Drive Banging MPG

It is taken with my digi cam and I can't make it smaller in size, sorry, it is 7mb and 20 seconds long..

Please let me know what I can do about this. It is a Maxtor 80 GB drive from a Dell 4100 P3 1Ghz. Can I swap the platters with another drive (does it have to be maxtor? and does it have to be a 80GB or can it be a 40, 60, 100, 120, 160, etc??) What are the rules and guidelines for drive repair?

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR ANY HELP YOU CAN PROVIDE!!!!!

 

mike u do know that ur HDD is now useless because u opened it?

 

Well it wans't working before. maybe spun 50-100 rpm / min, coulnd't feel it but could hear it.

tell me why is is destroyed now?

 

The read/write head of the drive is extremely sensitive, a little piece of dust can completely destroy it. Plus the data on your disc is so small, that a piece of dust on it is like mount everest to us. That's why they build those drives in sterile, dust-free factories.

 

Well, there might be some recoverable data left on it. The data doesn't evaporate immediately when you open the case. But each small particle of dust that gets under the heads does some damage, which is cumulative and unrepairable.

TimW's link was good, but perhaps you missed the section at <http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/heads/op_Height.htm>: note that the heads are not in contact with the spinning platter, but are "flying" above the platter with an air gap that is less than a thousandth the thickness of a human hair. To that gap, every dust particle is like a boulder, and does about as much damage to the platter surface when it gets sucked into the head gap by the spinning platter. No, you can't see the damage with the unaided human eye, but it's there. Don't overlook the fact that the data track on the platter surface is less than 1/10,000" wide in a modern drive.

Given what I saw in your video clip, mikepg, my guess is that the drive's electronics went south on you. The circuit board can sometimes be replaced with another from the same model of drive -- and it can usually be done without opening the drive's case. There may not be any point in going through that exercise now that the drive has been opened and run that way. But then -- maybe you'll get lucky.