Basic clean room for a HDD head transplant

[Galvanized]

I've never had a HDD go bad...Yet. willawake linked this site awhile back http://hddguru.com/ it is an interesting read and seems to be run by a Russian guy that suffers no fools.

A member over at AnandTech linked his home grown clean room for me and I thought some here might like a look. He did this back in 2003.
http://home.mn.rr.com/zephyrprime/bwaaa_ha_ha_ha.html

EDIT: This fella did practice on several dead HDDs before trying this repair.
He was able to remove all his files after the head transplant.

[Topcat]

Re: Basic clean room for a HDD head transplant

that's hillarious!

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Basic clean room for a HDD head transplant

Thanks for the link to that cool software... now if I could only find a way to repair the firmware in the Maxtor 541DX and Fireball 3 drives that I have an enormous stack of at work.

Speaking of that, how would someone modify the drive descriptor to ID in the BIOS as "Merit 0010" instead of "Maxtor Fireball 3" or whatever? These drives are used in our touchscreen games and Merit found a way to mod them so you can't use an off the shelf drive to replace a failed one. You have to pay them $200+ to get a new drive, which is the same crappy model that goes bad again, and again, and again. They will usually come up as Maxtor Athena or Maxtor Ares in the BIOS and won't work at all.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Basic clean room for a HDD head transplant

That is all controlled by the firmware

You could either try to hack the Firmware yourself with a HEX editor (it would probably fail since the CRC checksum would be different)

Or get the most recent firmware that is compatible with that drive... However upgrading a harddrive firmware is not a recommended procedure because they all contain maps of the bad sectors on the drive from when it was manufacturerd etc and if that info gets corrupted you will have a very unreliable drive...

But try asking the manufacturer, you might just get lucky...

[Rainbow]

Re: Basic clean room for a HDD head transplant

There is a HDD repair tool called PC3000 - it's an IDE controller card and software. The software can be used without the card (with a software emulator) - however it's not legal. The software includes tools for various disks, including Maxtor. The Maxtor tool can change disk name too, might even be able to fix some of the dead drives (but they're often physically bad - especially the slim line ones).

[pentium]

Re: Basic clean room for a HDD head transplant

I hope you can easily remove the tools when done. It looks glued together.

[willawake]

Re: Basic clean room for a HDD head transplant

how would someone modify the drive descriptor to ID in the BIOS as "Merit 0010" instead of "Maxtor Fireball 3" or whatever?

better to ask on http://hddguru.com/ forum.