Hard drive surgery

[<dsavage@peaknet.net>]

Back in the old days when Seagate ST-225A and -225N drives were so
commonplace it was easy to find piles of them that had gone bad for one
reason or another. We used to sort through those piles according to
failure type:  silent and noisy.  The silent failures usually had a bad
circuit board but perfectly good mechanicals. The noisy ones usually had
perfect circuits but deep groves plowed into a platter by a head crash.

It was a cinch to take the circuit board from a noisy failure and use it
to replace the board on a silent failure. On average we could make two
good drives out of five failed ones.

I've just had a silent drive failure on an IBM TravelStar 48G 5400rpm 2.5"
9mm notebook drive. As I look over this situation, its scale is a whole
lot smaller than the old five-inch half-height Seagates, and the circuit
board mounting screws are now v-e-r-y tiny Torx-types. I'm wondering... if
I can find an identical IBM 48 gigger that works, could I swap circuit
boards to restore my bad drive to service?  Long enough to tarball its
contents to an 80 gigger anyway.

Thoughts???

--Doc



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