

Ask HN: Replacing hard drive platters - sp332

In a wildly improbable attept at data recovery, a friend of mine is planning to transfer the platters from one laptop hard drive to another.  With the full realization that there's no realistic chance this will work, I'm looking for any tips, tricks, or expertise that might improve the odds here. Ridicule also welcome!<p>Thanks in advance!
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blasdel
Swapping the just the platters has zero chance of success.

If the drive isn't working and it's not making grinding noises, it's possible
that the controller board on the underside is zapped. I've had a 50/50 success
rate recovering data by swapping boards -- you have to find _identical_
drives, and be lucky too.

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stonemetal
<http://www.wikihow.com/Swap-Hard-Disk-Drive-Platters>

Is pretty much all the advice I would give.

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vaksel
Do you mean something like this?

<http://www.deadharddrive.com/>

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CyberFonic
You'd need a clean room and specialist equipment to do it. If the data is that
important use a professional service. The best ones only charge for successful
data retrieval, but that can cost from a couple of hundred $ to thousands.

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devicenull
If the data is important, there are services that will do this for you, and
likely have the equipment/knowledge to do this successfully.

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tdoggette
Clean, careful, and slow. Good luck.

