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Hard Drive Transplant

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Lupin:
I just blew up (literally) two 250 GB hard drives due to a combination of faulty power supplies and human error. Sparks and smoke came out of the circuit boards of the drives. One of the drives had some of its capacitors (or were they diodes) burn out while the other drive had it's microcontroller melt in a white hot glow.

I have no problems replacing the drive but the contents are virtually irreplaceable-mostly HD stuff from HDBits and FLAC from what.cd. With my ratio on both private trackers less than 1, redownloading all those torrents will get my account disabled.

Anyways, I've read somewhere that the data can still be recovered even in that state. You can replace the circuit board of the broken hard drive with another one, provided that they are of the same model and firmware. I do have a couple of 250 GB drives (I bought all the drives for a RAID 0+1 array before) of the same model and firmware but are plagued with bad sectors.

Has anyone tried doing this? All the drives are past their warranties. While I'm not scared dismantling/blowing up electronic/electrical devices, the thought of losing all those data scares the hell out of me.

Thanks.

bloody000:
Well, since you have a bunch of them you can try doing it on your bad drives first(not the freshly blew up ones).

fohfoh:
Grab a external case and test it out first. If it doesn't work... other methods are going to be very very messy.

Seriously though, this is basically data recovery. It might work, it might not. Some of the info might be damaged... but if you figure it out, you surely have a future in doing data recovery for a BIG buck.

kureshii:
What I've read before is, if the 2 drives are of the exact same model and make (or if you have other reason to believe this procedure is feasible), you can transfer the disk platters from the failed drive to the working drive. If all goes well, the new drive will read the old platters, and you can recover your data off the drive (assuming the platters are intact).

Mind you, while it's simple enough in concept to be described in one sentence, in reality it involves finding a dust-free environment, VERY careful disassembly of said drive and handling of platters (get one fingerprint or significant speck of dirt on those platters, it's game over unless you're lucky). In other words, not something you want to try if it's your first time.

You definitely want to do lots of reading up, and practise on an old/cheap drive or something. You will likely also need specialised tools; platters are not easy to remove without contamination (try disassembling an old drive).

Some details can be found here.

BotMan2:
OR

You can check if the main assembly (platters) only depends on a removable ribbon cable (or many ribbon cables) to connect to the main board of the HD. IF so, its theoretically possible without doing any soldering.

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