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This is an interesting one. Hard drives are very cool on the inside.
Remove all visible screws on the top and bottom.
Take off the PCB, but be wary of the pins, you dont want to bend them… Unless you arent going to try and recover it.
Take off, or cut any stickers that you see.
Here it is, the dramatic opening.
Shiny…
Look how perfect a mirror that is.
Good show.
These are the magnets. The SUPER MAGNETS!!!
Take em off so you can play with them.
Take the platters off.
Take the motors out.
Whole bunch of screws. Take em out.
Lets take off the arm.
Gorgeous!
I assume after performing this disassembly you no longer have a working hard drive?
That’s correct. It was a drive we were going to get rid of anyway, and we needed to destroy any personal data that might have been on it.
Did you find a “super magnet” when you disassembled the hard drive? My buddy has one (supposedly from a hard drive) on his fridge and it is powerful. I have an old COMPAQ sitting on my workbench in the garage - I may do some more surgery on it.
Yes, we found too really powerful magnets. They were part of the voice coil actuator system. (controls head movement over the platters)
They’re circled in the image below:
Would you recommend doing this for a broken drive to replace the plate into a working drive? I am trying to recover the data from a broken drive and have the same drive, i think to be replaced.
Thats a great way to destroy personal data!
Lots of fun!
Matt-
A tiny speck of dust can damage your hard drive; that’s why you’re not supposed to open them. I don’t think it is possible for someone to put hard drive platters back into a new drive with enough precision for it to be operable, either. There are data recovery services that can do this for a (large) fee, and they do their work in Clean Rooms, and they probably use expensive equipment, too. I’d rather try to reassemble a transmission with a pair of pliers and a framinig hammer.
Hi I once disasembled my hardrive on my old computer but it wasnt as neat and precise as your demonstration.
super sweet and awasome.
You can only move platters between 2 precisely identical drives because of the control hardware on the underside of the harddisk.
but keep in mind what valkor said.
I thought harddrives are vacumn sealed or pressure sealed to prevent dust from going in? I guess I was wrong. Nice job.
fantastic
I think it would be a nice touch if a seethrough cover was put on a drive so as to see it working. { from the factory of course ]
Hi Iam completely green here and I think you guys are great! Is it possible to add detailed instructions on taking apart all gadgets?
coool dude
I once saw people taking old hard drives and making analog clocks out of them - putting the clock assembly through the hole in the platters. I’ve often wondered about trying this myself but forgot about it until your demonstration.
Scrappy-
The new Raptor drives have a clear cover. Check out their page
A couple of comments on drives, if you have 2 of the same model you can swap out the control boards to try & recover your info but when you open them even the slightest little bit in the cleanest room in your house they will most likely be JUNK after that. The smallest spec of dust will wipe out a platter in micro seconds. but the old ones have great magnets and the platters can be used for many things but take note if you bend, bang or bump the platter some can very sharp pieces of coating that will cut you and may cause a bad infection. It’s kind of like a really really bad paper cut only much worse.
Hard drives are the best source of Neodymium magnets, which are pretty powerfull, and cost about 20 sterling pounds if you want to buy them. The types used in hard disks also come with hand mounting plates attached with screw holes, making them usefull for all sorts of things. BEWARE, don’t get any parts of your body (fingers usually) caught between two of these as it will hurt. I deliberately trapped my ear-lobe between two of these and I’ve had lump on my ear for two years!!!!!!!
Thanx for the guide. I will give a try to mine which are no longer serviceable.
seen you on the bbc last night
i wish that wasn’t anyone’s harddrive
i never seen hard drive like this before
I had opened out a hard drive sometime back. The noble attempt was to fix data errors. I had barely exposed the platters, when a colleague came along and ran her finger on the platter and declared — “Hey, this really smooth”. Needless to say that the Hard drive became a ‘Had’ drive.
great thanks.. came here after clickonline. i’ll try to put something i rip apart myself soon. bye
Sweet!
This is so cool my cpu-cooler spits icecubes!
I can’t get mine open. I unscrewed everything but the metal cover is so hard that anything I try to use as leverage breaks. Any ideas?
Brilliant article.
I used to teach the Novell CNE course, Service and Support. (Hardware configuration and fault finding, remember jumpers). I used to have a harddisk that we had removed the cover from and had NetWare installed on it. It was quite good fun to fire up the server watching the heads move across the surface while booting and running. It lasted for almost a year being brought out of the closet for each class. Eventually it got too many errors and would pretty much only spin up but it was suprising how long it did last.
Another site I worked out had one of the ships anchors size disks they had cut through on a band saw. Quite a bit of art with the multiple platters etc in cross section.
Jim
it was a great disassembling the hard disk. had a lots of fun all thanks to bbc
few days back, i tried to operate my hard drive which was no longer in use. and did all these operations thinking that , ya i will fix the prob, but couldn’t even put the drives at their place…..:(
@ jhon
Check to see if one of the stickers is hiding a screw as in the above pikkies,the plate is not held down that hard once “ALL”the screws are removed by rights it should lever off relativly easily,it’s unlikley any glue was added to the plate at point of manufcture
I disassembled a hard drive with a claw hammer once. Much more fun.
why not make a clock out of it while your’e taking it apart?
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects/s2006/ja94/Amsel%20-%20Klitinek%20Final%20Project/index.htm
just follow the link.. real nice
I had a internal HDD in an external case. A month ago I heard noises coming from my PC. First, I shut of the external drive. The noise stopped. I immediately knew what will happen next; the 30GB Quantum Fireball in the External case is going bad.
Having gone through a bad experience losing 27 MB worth of rather important pictures, I immediately copied everything to my internal 80GB Drive, bought a WDC 80GB external HDD, transferring the copies to the new HDD.
This is going to be like high school biology, except I am dissecting a Hard Drive.
The faceplate is different than yours in the photo. I have removed all the screws. Except for the stickers, I now believe I have figured out how the FP is removed.
I am going after the platters and the magnets. Are there any dangerous items, such as a capacitor, I should avoid?
I have a hard drive which i wish to take apart, but it has screws in it with six indentations in it, unlike the usual four on a Philips head. do i need any special equipment to do this?
Thank You! I solved my Hard Drive Problem by using this guide. Thanks a lot……
To Sam. The 6 indentations are called ‘Torq’ screws. They are very commen in all electronic gear. Check with electronics supply shops for tools. Where I am (US), companies like Harbor Freight sell bit sets. (Just picked up a 33 pc ’security’ bit set, these types of screws are also commen in electronics). The most common size of ‘Torq’ screws in the HD are ‘T-10′ and smaller.
BTW. Should you want to seperate the ’super magnets’ from the backing, I’ve had good luck with simply stricking a strong blow horizontially. (Using a broad blade screwdriver and a hammer.) This will sometimes lose a bit of the plating, but the magnets are often more useful by themselves. Since they are very brittle, I like to dip them into a plastic coating material. (I’ve used products wit trade names ‘Pasti Dip’ and ‘Plasti Kote’ for years.
predobro, stari…
idem odmah rastavit svoj prastari 5gb hard drive kojeg je vrlo vjerojatno i sam isus koristio
SOS !
my western digital disk has started making a clicking noise when i plug it in !
i cant access it now !
what could be the cause ?
nice job!
Nice post. It takes away the mystery behind hd.
As for posters asking about recovery..theres a number of free software, trial ware, you can use to recover your data. I’ve done a number of recovery to say this with confidence
Hook up your hd on the second ide, run chkdsk and recover info. , fix mbr etc. or recovery software. The data is there ..ya just need to peek at it
Its not always a physical failure. I:)
I have a western digital 320 gb USB 2.0 drive. I plugged in the wrong adaptor from a different usb drive and apparently destroyed the board and now it won’t spin. I have 320 gb of data on it that’s not backed up and was thinking the only solution is to replace the board (2060-7601314-002 Rev A). Is this possible?
Das, just take the hard drive our of the enclosure and plug it into one of your IDE controllers. Wouldn’t that be easier?
Das-
Actually switching the logic boards is not difficult. I would recommend buying the same drive and switching boards BUT remember they have to be the same Firmware or it may not work! The firmware number is located on the drive where the model and serial numbers are located. BTW it requires a Torx bit to remove the screws. Hope this helps.
I was told that you can remove the internal disc from any laptop hard drive and place it in another laptop hard drive (Different manufacturer hard drive/ laptop). Can somebody please assist me in proving or disproving this theory. I understand that the data will not survive but will the drive be operational. Is there a standards for the arm, disc thickness and what not. It seemed like too much of a broad statement at the time for it to be true. However I will give the individual the benefit of the doubt and assume he was talking about 2.5″ drives only. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I’m not that technical a person but would like to know if this person was full of it. Thanks for your time in advance.
I shot my hard drive from my old Xbox, only the third bullet went through, tough little things, tons of fun that day… good times
I have a seagate 320 GB sata that spins but is clicking and is not recognized by the computer even when doing auto detect in BIOS, I need to get 300GB of data of data off and purchased the same drive with the same firmware. By comparing the two I noticed the one that was not working was missing(broken) a component on the board that was on the new one. Going to try switching the old board with new one tonight, wish me luck.
As I had stated, I was going to do the following of regaining my dtat back by switching the controller cards on the two hardrives…..IT WORKED!!!!,
I was able to recover all 300 GB of data back, the most time consuming was backing the data off the drive onto another drive.Hey, but I am happy.
now to RMA my Seagate drive
Great. Now I really know what to do with my non-working hard drive.
OH this is unbeliveable hard drive.
I found this exact same hardrive that my cousin gave me. I didn’t know how to take the arm off but you helped me sooo much. thanks
-Jake
I had a hard drive fail on my Toshiba Satellite Laptop and when I removed the HD I could hear a “clicking” sound. I tried everything in my power to retrieve the information but unfortunatly it was a total loss. I then turned to my HD manufacture and called Seagate in Santa Clara, CA and spoke to the recovery dept. They told me to have my hard drive information recovered in a “clean room” at their facility the cost is: $1,700.00. The process includes; taking the platter from the HD and re-reading it onto another drive. So yes it can be done but it is very expensive. On-a-good note; if they cannot retrieve the information you do not get billed.
I have a seagate…that is just clicking…like Codys….. I was also thinking about getting another hard drive the same one…and try to swap out the controller cards. is this hard to do?