|
|
Here we start off with one hard drive, before the mahem begins.
Here are the six screws to be removed on the top of the hard drive to remove the lid.
There’s one more screw hidden under a sticker on the lid, I just used the good ole’ finger to hand screw this one out, It didnt need much.
After you get those out you can just pull the lid off.
Now we go to work on removing the back circuitboard
You can see the two main screws at the top.
Since these screws are machine drilled in, some of them may need a bit more “encouragement” to come out than others.
Now just remove the bottom set of screws.
Now before you remove the circuit board, just pull out the ribbon cable connecting the circuit board to the read/write head.
Now the circuit board should just come right off.
Next I unscrewed the ribbon cable connecting the read/write head to the circuit board from the inside of the casing.
Next is removing the top half of the hard drive magnet.
Then I just lifted the top magnet off with a screwdriver.
To remove the read/write head first remove a sticker from the bottom of the casing(it should be one of the few things left of the bottom casing.) And unscrew that one.
After that, the head should just pop off. Just make sure that you dont try to remove the read/write head while it is still on the disks, you will not be able to remove it from there. Move the head toward the top of the drive and then pop it out.
Now just remove the last few screws from the bottom magnet and pop that out and you are done!
The Aftermath, plus about a dozen screws.
After you are done you can use the magnets (which are quite strong might I add) to hold up just about anything magnetic. I would also like to thank kait, my girlfriend, for the actual idea of using my finger to remove the last screw from the upper lid. None of my screwdrivers quite fit.
happy disassembly!
-Philip
Great to see all the innards but I fail to see what the point is.
Hard drives are vacuum sealed in a clean environment so unless you have the equipment to put it together it serves little purpose other than to satisfy curiosity.
Having said that I have to say that I admire the posters patients.
Disassembling a hard disk drive in a room not designated as a clean room does not guarantee failure. Several guides are on the internet instructing you on how to repair an old hard drive. Disassembling a hard disk drive outside a clean room only has high risk of failure, not a 100% chance.
I don’t know if any point is being made but I really enjoyed it, so thanks a lot!
“Having said that I have to say that I admire the posters patients. ”
I must have missed the part in the walkthrough where he said he was a doctor or that he had patients. WTG champ!
Can one use the motor of the hard drive for anything? Is it a “Brushless” DC type, as in CD-ROM Drives?
I dont recall there being any type of motor, its a magnetically floating servo arm.
I use disks from old hard drives to make wind chimes it works good.
Like where’s the little guy inside with the filing cabinets and post it notes?
I found the comments more interesting than the hard drive : )
thank sto you al coz i love every little bit of it
i always take apart my old hard drives before i throw them away. why? because i like to see what they look like inside. when you aren’t concerned about putting it back together, you can dismantle it in less than 5 minutes.
HDs use stepper motors or voice coil motors. you can’t just apply voltage to the leads and get it to spin. this will only fire 1 step of the rotation. you would have to use a stepper motor controller. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ih/doc/stepper/
“Having said that I have to say that I admire the posters patients. ”
I must have missed the part in the walkthrough where he said he was a doctor or that he had patients. WTG champ!
we all know what he was meaning to say. at least *his* comment had value, unlike yours.
I found the whole exercise quite informative. It gives one an insight as to what goes on in a hard drive. Obviously no-one would think of re-assembling a hard drive but instead of thowing a ‘Dodgy’ drive away at least we have learned a little more about our computer. Well I did anyway.
Thanks for your contribution Philip and thanks to your girlfriend. All my scews came out without any trouble.
Have a nice life……………Frankie boy.
dude, why would you waist a perfectly good hdd
The magnets are worth it - they’re amazingly strong. Bullet(read: Toddler)proof fridge postings!
the old western dig 10&20 mb hdd’s had moters in them 2 , 1for the turn table an 1 for the reader, the reader was screw drive
I need to reclaim data off of a hard drive. I don’t need the drive to work long term, it just needs to live long enough to copy the data off. After that, it goes in the trash bin. I may have access to a clean room, should I use the room or not? I have located sites like this that show how to take it apart, but nothing explaining how to put it back together, or how to transfer the plates to another drive, and make it work. Please post the URL.
This is the first time i visite this site and i think the hard disk exercise was very informative
Yes, these magnets are EXTREMELY strong. Taking stuff apart is a great way to learn about things and the education gained can be more valuable than the item disassembled. This site offers immense education opportunities!
the magnets are very strong i took mine apart. say do u guys ever concidder droping a hard drive out a bedroom window or smashing it up?
Yes. I will leave it at that
My Maxtor HD failed one time…… I need to get some files from it.. i tried throwing it in a Grassy part of the neighborhood.. after which i picked it up again.. and amazingly.. it works! until now the old HD is still working.. and i’m using it as a back up drive … heheh try it sometimes guys.. might help .
Just updated mother boards to a NF325-A7 Biostar. I had 3 hard drives in it when I powered up.
Now 2 of the 3 only show 32gig - the other on a 300 gig Seagate is fine. The two with problems are Maxtor 6Y250p0 and a Samsung HD300LD.
I tried both in two different pc’s and same thing - only 32 gig.
On the Samsug - using a partition recovery utility - I can see the data on it, but as of yet - not been able to bring it back.
HELP
thanks
Thanks so much kait,
You forgot to remove the platter(s) and turntable assembly.
I want to transfer the plates to another hard drive unit to retreave my lost data is this possible can anyone help or is it to risky
I have two maxtors i took apart and i can spin them up watch how they work, and i had a 10gb Seagate U series 5 still works it had been throw a fire and 2 feet of water in the basement and still going!
I took one of these apart once in the hopes of fixing it… bad idea. If you are desparate to save the data, spend some money and send it to a data recovery shop.
By the way when you say “none of your screwdrivers quite fit” the last screw, it is probably because you needed a special Torx screwdriver. It’s not very common, but if you get a mini screwdriver kit at Radio Shack, you can usually find one with a few torx screwdrivers in it. They are really secure, and heavily resistant to using one of your other screwdrivers because they are so smooth.
Hi, I enjoy spending any spare time fidling with gadgets so followed the above to disasemble an old HD, then reasembled it in reverse order & connected it to an old computer for testing.
It did sort of work but fairly slow & noisey. For dust control, I used compresed air.
Many thanks to Phillip & Kait for the idea.
Stan.
60 years old last week and 40 years in computers. Yes the magnets are strong. 25 years ago when a 300MB HDD was the size of a washing machine those magnets were the size of 2 litre milk containers.
I remember pulling one apart to replace the bearings for the head array. Defenitely more than 8 screws. Thousands of dollars involved to buy one plus it was a days drive from the nearest City.
So do what we used to in those days. Make a backup of what has changed in your well organised folders. Not a backup of a disk. Just the folder. Use a DVD or better yet use a USB external.
I haven’t taken a “bad” HDD apart yet, but I found this site by Googling “neodymium magnets from a hard drive “. The reason was to follow up on a recommendation to salvage the magnets due to their unusual strength.
I have toyed with the idea of replacing the discs from a crashed drive onto a working drive to recover data and also re-working a bad HDD to make a small parts grinder, as seen on several video hosting sites. Which brings up the question; When a drive “crashes” does the read/write head get off track, stuck or what?
Whatever; I don’t bash anyone for ever posting ANY useful info. Good job!
I found this very informative and I thank you because I’m doing a project for taking apart a Hard Drive in class and this will make a for a great explanation.
is it possible to fix a dead harddrive? I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, Model ST312002A and would love to get my data off of it. I can’t afford the price to recover the data… If its not wise to do then I will keep it until I can afford the cash to do it. I been quoted 700 - 2400 to do this. Gotta be a cheaper place. Any ideas, I live in Vancouver, Canada… please emial me at m8xxm8n@yahoo.com
Thanks in Advance
a
I took the HDD from my old PC apart with a friens, we didn’t have the torx screwdirver, so we smashed it up a bit and it still wouldn’t open! It put up more of a fight than a safe I’m sure of it.
It was fun though!
HDD’s are kept clean by a dust filter but aren’t vacuum sealed. I imagine that working under an AC vent with a fresh filter would greatly reduce the chances of breaking a working drive — but who wants to take apart a working drive??
Anyway, congrats on the disassembly but I gotta beg to differ whether the big piece with the platters still inside is really taken apart yet…
Cheers
saving hard disk data… might just work. had a laptop hard disk which fell down (was being used as a mobile storage device). opened it up, and found the platter motor seemed stuck. just forced it free, without touching the platters, and plugged in with the ide to usb converter to my pc (hdd was open at the time). retrieved some data (around 13gigs were accesible, from a 20gig hard disk). motor was a dc motor (servo driven, i am told), and this is supposed to be the type of motors in more recent hard disks. my old Quantum fireball had a nice stepper, though
Ive hacked a hard drive apart and if you remove the green circuit board on the back you’ll see a set of contacts nearest the power and IDE connectors if you take the speaker wires from a stereo playing music and you touch the wires to the 2 end connectors that were under the circuit board try them all till you hear music when you hear music solder some wires to these 2 points then you can hook up your new hard drive speaker, awesome teardown and if you want to see videos of computer hard drives acting as speakers head over to http://www.youtube.com and search hard drive speaker and youll find some on there that are mine im coondogtheman1234 on youtube
can you take the platter from a bad HDD and put it into another working HDD - both are Barracuda 7200.7 80GB
Thanks, Buck
My girlfriend recently smashed my laptop off the floor in anger because I found out she was having an affair so I left her and she did that to my laptop, now my laptop is obliterated, the harddrive powers on but it just clicks and makes some weird whirring noises does anybody reckon it would be safe and open it up just to see if its stuck, as I have read somewhere sometimes its just the arm inside which can get stuck. Its vital I try to get my data recovered as it contains vital things for my medical history, my job, and my course work which I had stored on there for a degree I am working towards, anybody have any advice?