Hard Drive Failure (Part 2)

In the Hard Drive Failure blog entry, I mentioned that I can likely recover the data from my failed hard drive if I can get the BIOS transferred from the broken PCB controller card to a working PCB controller card. I am keeping both the failed drive and the matching working drive in storage in case I get an opportunity to attempt recovery sometime in the future.

During a recent video chat, a friend said that he once saw a video on YouTube where somebody transferred hard drive platters between drives! I had not heard of this option. From what I can gather, the BIOS contains calibration settings for the hard drive heads. By swapping platters, the working hard drive still has matching BIOS and heads, so the BIOS does not need to be transferred. This option sounds extremely unlikely to succeed, however, because my failed drive (likely) has multiple platters, making alignment a huge issue.

My wife and I are preparing for a camping trip this weekend, and my wife decided to get rid of a headlamp that is no longer reliable. I disassembled it because my daughter loves working with such tools and electronics, and I was happy to find that there are some really small SOPs on the PCB! While I do not plan on attempting the BIOS transfer myself, I am going to “practice” the transfer on the headlamp PCB and confirm that my soldering iron is too clunky for the job.