Swap platters instead of head assembly?!

[IT-Service-Reiter.de]

Hello,

I'm still pretty new to DR and bought the PC3000 Portable. I've been practicing now on an old drive with 5 heads, head 3 is very slow and now stoped at all reading data.

As I was able to image the other platters, only the platter with head 3 is left. My idea was now, not to look for a donor to replace the heads, but swap the platters, eg. platter 3 with platter 0 as head 0 is fine.

Would this work? And how would I tell PC 3000 or the HDD in the firmware that head 0 reads now the data of head 3?

I'm looking forward to your feedback. Let me know if this is a stupid idea or would actually work.

Kind regards
Matthias

 

[pclab]

Hey

Usually you only swap platters if you have spindle issues.
You don't swap platters because of alignment issues that make everything very hard.
Just swap heads!

 

[IT-Service-Reiter.de]

Thanks @pclab for your reply. I see, I just thought maybe you can get around finding a donor that way.

What exactly needs to be aligned to what? Is this when you see in data recovery videos that they put tape on the side of the platters, so they don't change position to each other?

On my basic training with ACELab, the instructor said it's always just one head active and reading/writing at the same time. That made me think that it is not important which orientation the platters to each other have.

 

[pclab]

But if you misaligned them, then you might lose access to the other platters data.
Always got for the headswap in first place.