hard drive data recovery

< > What we now need is for some brave person (me, Allison???) to take a < > number of old (and dead) drives, make a clean box, pull them apart, < > document everything, and write a repair manual.... To date I've successfuly opened and fixed maxtor2190s and Micropolus 1325s wit HDA difficulties. I've run a RD52 with the cover off as a demonstration and I have somewhere a 16 year old st506 with a lexan topcover for viewing. It all boils down to what was the failure and is it fixable. The latter can be hard as platter assemblies and generally "glued and screwed" and tend to be hard to get apart. Heads are small fine things easily broken. If the media is scared it's a total as the metal will be everywhere and some fo the metal like the head cantelever is steel so all that steel dust is now in the magnet assembly for the positioner... Not impossible but there is a certain amount of pick and choose in which one to fix. Allison