Seagate ST3500830A - SA ground off! Question

[Todd Morden]

Hi all,

I've got a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500830A Firmware 3.AAD 500GB IDE hard drive.
It was a click of death sound.  Did some analysis and had a good idea that it wasn't the firmware.  So I opened her up and found what you see in the picture.
The best I can see is that this side of the platter is the only side that is damaged.  Essentially it powers up and spins, the heads unlock and go to what I believe is the SA and then back again over and over until it shuts itself down.  The spot appears to be the same every time and as you can see from the picture.. no hope of reading anything from this area. 

I'm looking for some input.  I have thought about obtaining a donour.  Using the board from my client drive and initializing with the donour drive so that it comes ready. I was then going to transfer the client drive back to the client board and try and image what I can using DDI.  Is this something that seems feasible? and might work?

I'm still new to this so I'm not certain what other data could be on this side of the platter.. I was hoping that it would be all system stuff and that I could potentially get the user data in its entirety.  I'm holding my breath here but if it isn't feasible I'll let them know now.

Cheers

--
Todd Morden

[IT LAND]

Hi Todd,

From how it looks like i believe its your only hope - doing smart hot
swap as you describe in your post.
Maybe if the hdd is operational during the hot swamp it is better to
image it in few stages, first the LBA section before the
scratch(estimated) to avoid killing the heads trying to read from the
damaged area.
I have a 2.5" segate drive with similar problem, i replaced heads 3
times they worked for few minutes and died probably from the platter
damage.
I am waiting for an ultrasonic cleaner to try and clean those
platters, will see if it helps at all.

Cheers Mate,
Oded

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