waterlogged hard drive recovery

Fri Nov 18 19:14:59 PST 2005

hi ya

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, John Costello wrote:

> Naturally.  I was expressing my opinions of the situation.  I agree 
> with the YMMV.  If someone could show me the DIY, that would be pretty 
> neat.  Then again, I do have a couple of old dead hard drives around the 
> house.  Hmm.

the diy ...
	you need a special screw driver to unscreww the pcb
	from the disk drive

	you might need to desolder the 4 wires from the disk drive
	going to the disk controller board or unplug it if you're lucky

	do the same to the new disk controller and reverse the
	order to use the new disk controller

-- the problem is ...
	- most disk has air vents on the disks so its NOT waterproof
	and sometimes its vaccuum so you will need a special room
	to remove the heads/platters

	you may or may not need to rotate the exposed platters on
	your test rig to read the data off the platters
	( depends on how the head floats on the platters )

-- most all of the data on the platter can be read by just about
   any disk scontroller that follows the same st-504(?) standards
   about head gaps, data gaps, sync, and bunch of other junk 
   for the pll to resync itself on each revolution and each sector
	- the wiring and heads will be different on different models

c ya
alvin