Well, mu-metal would be a reasonable screen, but it's not cheap and

be bent to shape after annealing. A larger room might well be cheaper! If it's magnetic damage to the servo information, then it's almost impossible to repair. You'd need a clean room and the rig used to write the information at the factory. I don't think many hobbyists have that sort of setup. The other suggestion was mechanical damage from vibration. This might

more likely, actually. Repairing that (which would be similar to a

headcrash) is going to be impossible as well. In general even _I_ class modern hard drives as being impossible to repair. I'll do electronic repairs on the older winchesters (but modern drives are all custom chips, so that's impossible now), and I'll repair demountables with no problems at all. But I don't have a clean room to dismantle the HDA (yet!) -tony