Somewhat off topic, but this should help the computers owner realize that backup's are a lot easier in the long run. If this is a client of yours, you should see if you could help them find a decent backup solution.

If it was absolutely imperative that I had the data on that drive, I would hock my car to get it if I had to, yes. If I wanted the data, but it wasn't imperative that I had it RIGHT NOW, I would store the drive in a safe place until I had SAVED ENOUGH MONEY to pay for the recovery. If you're willing to risk your data, or are just looking for an excuse to diddle around with the insides of a hard drive, I say go for it. If nothing else, it'll be a fun learning experience!
The precision I spoke of refers to the distance between the platter and the read head, which is measured in MICRONS, as in thinner than a millimeter, not the distances of travel involved in removing the housing screws.

And 69_rs_ss, you're comment is spot on target.

I take it you have never disassembled a drive before then. The head is like a very fine piece of wire but is then surrounded by a teflon block so when the platter isn't spinning the teflon block actually touches it (this is why they no longer need to park) when the drive spins up the speed of the platters spinning causes the teflon block to float on a few micros of air and the head wire is inbedded in that block. What it means is you can swap platters without needing to align anything simply keep the head block as far to the outside of the disk as possible in the landing zone where there is no data.
I have done this before a revcovered data and while it does kill the drives afterward if you can take your time and be careful it works and you need no special tools and don't have to worry about alignments.

Sounds fun.

"No user servicable parts inside" is like red rag to a bull. "Only to be opened by authorised personnel" is an open invitation (pun intended).

My contributions to this thread were intended to highlight the unreliability of a drive once it has been opened. Now I can't wait for the chance to transplant pletters between drives having read other people's contributions. This might not strictly be a Linux topic but it has been a fascinating one.

this is another hd that i had run without the cover on , a smaller one , quantum ProDrive ELS , its a 180 mb scsi , the initial problem might be the read/write head was sticky , also a freedos installation , boot it up again this time without the cover on , had been running for about 2 hrs , before that i saw some hair-line dusts on the platters , run scandisk with surface scan , reported 98,304 bad sectors , using the installed editor and filemanager here and there without any problem so far , i had done that on other hd , some bigger one , 4gb i guess( i can't find it , donno where i placed it , that "trash" part of my place are kind of messy) , this quantum ELS still spinning right now , 2 platters and 3 read/write heads , the rotation speed is just 3,600 rpm , i find no data about the platters coatings from quantum sites ..

enine ::
i'm kind of curious what exactly did you mean by saying after revcovering data it does kill the drives(granted that platters and arms had been swapped in your case) , is it because of the coating you mentioned earlier ? or maybe problem will occur if tested on newer and faster hd(lets say a 40gb , 7200rpm) ...

Yep the coating, after you have opened the drives the platters attrach dust and it affects the magnetic coating so after a few days the drive won't work anymore, but its long enough to revcover data.

you mean it affect the newer drives only instead of older ones ??

affects all of them, dust in the air reacts with the magnetic coating on the platters, so swapping platters on a drive without a clean room will detroy the drives in a matter of days but they work long enough to recover the data.
find a dead drive and pull it apart then remove the platter and sit ti somewhere and over the period of a few days you will see it change color

then why my hd still working ("normally" , i mean without stressing much read/write on it though) , is it because i never leave it open for a few days as what you had mentioned ??

hard to say, I would guess maybe so since it didn't have time to gather much dust.

will definately take note of your infos seriously and look into platters coating some other days ...

I opened my Deathstar.
The platter is very pretty.
Oooh...shiny thing...

Now if you leave the drive open for a few days it should start to get dull. If you touch the platter with your finger it will leave a fingerprint and the oil from your skin will eat away the magnetic covering there real fast but the rest it will take a few days.
Now look at the head arm, see the little square block on the ends that is the little teflon block that slides on the drive. This is why you can swap parts it is what sets the spacing of the heads.

It's a dead drive, and I see.