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3.5" Seagate Ext HDD arm repair.

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delad123:
Hello all. First may I say thanks for letting me join.
I am an amateur  tech guy age 62 so dont be hard on me. 
My problem is a Seagate 3.5" external harddrive.  The heads are damaged on the arm(see pic). The platters are scratch free . Initial problem was the drive motor was not running.  This has been solved by replacing a diode. But on running it, clicking was heard and on opening, arm was in park and heads were like this.
My question is. Can i get a replacement arm or have to buy a new HD. I have a lot of family data on this drive and would love to be able to retrieve it .
Any help greatly appreciated.

Twoflower:
I would say: No chance unless you have opened that drive in a clean-room and took great care to not let the head-debris come close to the platters.

The only way I see to get your data back is using your backup (with no backup the data were not important) or use a professional data recovery service. That you opened the drive and contaminated the discs with dust probably not reduced the price for that service and reduced the chance to recover the data.

Some perspective about the dust problem: The heads fly on an air cushion of 5nm over the platters (depends on the drive). A human hair has an diameter of over 100µm. 


Edit: Fixed a typo

delad123:
Thanks for the information.  This hard drive was the backup drive as the data on it was from an old PC.

james_s:
Yeah no way, even if you salvage a head assembly from another drive it's highly unlikely that it will ever work, and if you do get it to work it will never be trustworthy. The heads and platters inside a hard drive are extremely fragile high precision assemblies.

golden_labels:
Unfortunately information on this drive should be considered lost. Recovering data is technically still possible, but requires specialized equipment and expertise. Having a cleanroom at one’s disposition — as mentioned by others — is already putting that beyond what a hobbyist can do. Companies offering such services charge hundreds to thousands of dollars per drive, and there is no price list — one must contact the company to negotiate the cost. Basically out of reach of a typical consumer, who would like to recover family photos. However, I am mentioning that option in case those are not just family photos.

A relevant video from Dave, showing just one aspect of how incredibly precise and complicated mechanism HDDs are:

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