Agree with Darrin,
The usual issue is the PCB, you can do a donor but as stated you really need the exact same drive even better get the same part number and revision on the PCB it should have it. Then you have a good chance.
Outside of this it's going to the pro's to do anything as opening a hard drive your almost 99.9% of the time going to screw it further.
For those that are interested.
I've seen the recovery process taking place.
they usually start by opening the drive in a clean room / device.
They then look at the heads if this is the problem area they either order the exact model or they have emulators that can be programmed to the required specs.
They then inspect the platter under a microscope
If it's the platters they usually replace the heads and then basically read the platter block by block at a very slow rate and copy anything off the drive stopping and bypassing the damaged section.
You can then do a recovery on the recovered data on the other drive.
Other methods can be used and i'm sure google is your friend lol!
and as much as people sometimes say you can put the hard drive in the freezer and it will spin up one last time! i tired it, it doesn't work!
Disk recovery companies?
. I've dropped the whole box off at the local computer shop. They have names of a couple of recovery companies. If they can get it to the point where they get the lilo menu we'll see if any of the partitions (2 Linux, 1 Windows) will boot. One of the Linux and Windows are on another spindle.
