Dead Hard Drives - Fixing a Stuck Head

**ABSOLUTELY DO NOT TRY AT HOME. This is a fun experiment, opening a drive will remove any chance or recovering data. My failings as this progressed should be evident of that. This video definitely does not follow a narrative I believe in now.

Original Description: I had a stack of drives, many dead, and experimented in making them work again.

[YuYoung]

These must be some special drives. I just did everything he showed (by the way his arm blocked the actual movement of the arm). My arm still haven't moved and I have the required tools. Fifth video I watched with the same useless results.

[NetRolllerD]

I definitely wouldn't recommend using such a HDD any longer - the heads may be weakened by the unstick maneuver. Instead, quickly copy everything off to a safe HDD using ddrescue. If a drive has been opened (even professionally in a lab), it should be quickly imaged and then considered broken.

[bernisworlds]

any source/seller where i canbuy "hdd head"?

[trvebm]

I've got a 12y/o HDD. opened up and the head was in place.

Before opening, I had connected it to the MOBO and then on the same test bench, I ran Mint using a Live USB. Listed the disk with lsblk, and I could see it as sda2. sda1 was the live USB. But... I could not install mint on it (via the installer). SO I tried to manually format, using mkfs.ext4 and got the error, unable to read/write etc, basically it was an input-output error. I also could not list it with fdisk.

So is my drive dead? It had some data, but I am not really concerned about loosing that. Just wanted to resurrect it, and probably us it as an external HDD, by installing some distro on it. Have you got any idea?

[Fa]

bro is there any solution i have wd elements 1tb, when i connect it to my and other laptops, it sounds connecting but showing loading also slowdown my all laptop which it is connected at that time, also disk management not opening when it is connected, please help me how to fix this.

[RixtronixLAB]

I got sound of motor ON then OFF, and repeat, any ideas how to fix it ? thanks

[ellohssaeucoof]

Im surprised it even worked at all after bending that top head upwards so much.

[NeverSuspects]

it will rapidly fail entirely as the small bit of dust you introduced to the inside of teh drive is going to fly banging into things and slipping between the heads and the disk surface, copy your data and get a new drive its going to be all bad sectors after a month

[itsMarinaLabung]

Hi what tools do you use to disassemble them? Like what type of screwdrivers and brand?

[manuelyepez]

Hi Nick, I have a question and excuse my ignorance, my external hard drive was dropped and when I put it back and turned on, I got the clicking and beeping sound, and of course no reading. I went and try it on another computer and it worked, no sounds, I was able to initiate the back up of the data but then, when the backing up was happening it started to show a message saying that random files could not be transferred, so I skipped them and the transfer continued. Then, the hard drive started to make the clicking sounds and the transfer just stayed on hold. After that, I could not finish the backup and the drive did not want to work again. My mistake: I tried back on a different computer several times getting, of course, the same awful results. Did I just kill the hard drive? Is there a chance to get the data out of there? If the motor is stuck, are there any chances of using the 'disk' on a new case/motor and head? Would that allow me to get the data out? or is just dead and lost forever?
Thanks

[frasercorrance]

If you are seriously interested in learning about data recovery, you should check out the classes taught by Scott Moulton.

[frasercorrance]

Have you ever noticed that in videos made by data recovery professionals they are wearing gloves? There are several reasons for this that you should understand BEFORE opening your drive.

[adambtolbert]

my hard drive got stuck and data inaccessible then i tried stellar data recovery and recovered my data.