How To Fix Damaged Hard Drives With Jammed Spindle Motors

We have been told many times by our clean room data recovery engineers they have low success rate on drives with stuck motor and they cannot do much on these difficult cases until they begin to use the spindle replacement tool.

When we received damaged hard drives with stuck or jammed motors, we usually consider using some kind of hdd repair hardware to disassemble the hard drives, remove the heads carefully and then remove the platters of the patient drives to a donor hard drive. Well, this is not easy data recovery work especially when there're multiple platters of over 2 with dumpers between the platters.

We know there're some data recovery tools manufacturers claiming to be able to swap multiple platters with dumpers but few of them can do it with good result and even some of them caused second damage or permanent loss to our customers' data which disappointed and annoyed us a lot. There's one data recovery tools supplier declared their one-by-one platter exchange for jammed-motor drives with dumpers but it seems only their own clean room data recovery engineers are able to use that data recovery technology successfully but none of the rest. Maybe a thousand times' try will make it.

So what to do to increase our data recovery success rate while the traditional data recovery technology for jammed-motor drives failed?

Thanks to HDDsurgery, we got the spindle replacement tool. It's innovatively changing the way of clean room data recovery. It's to replace the jammed spindle instead of head and platter replacement which will be kept in place and alignment for successful data recovery. However, this tool is working so far for a limited drive families: Seagate 7200.11 and 7200.10 and support the following drive models: Read more here on data recovery magazine

Samsung Head Swap Tips-Donor Search

So when you confirm it is physical head damage which requires you to perform the head swap to extract the lost data, the next step is to find a donor head or donor hard drive. What's a donor hard drive for Samsung head swap?

From the old families before Victor, Puma, Verna & etc. ( Max capacity 120Gb, Max Head number 4 ) donor drive for Heads stack has to be chosen by the 4-th symbol on the side sticker which consist from 5 symbols. There are 3 versions of this sticker: xxxAx, xxxRx, xxxSx. 4-th symbol should match on patient and on donor drive, this symbol is responsible for this drive Heads stack manufacturer.

From the families like Palo, Magma, P80M, Delphi and other ( Max capacity 160Gb, Max Head number 4 ) to Poseidon family ( Max capacity 250Gb, Max Head number 4 ), the donor drive could be recognized by other symbols on the top sticker after P/V. There are 2 versions of such sticker: P\V: xS, P\V: xA. As you see the second symbol should be matched. Nowadays this sticker as P/V: xA does not exists on manufactured drives.

There are no symbols/codes responsible for Heads on the HDD stickers for Trident( T133(S)), T166(S), M60(S), M80(S) ) families . But the hard drive manufacturer started to use only "S ( SAE )" heads. So , for this families, the heads stack donor has to belong same family and its heads map should be the same as on patient.

Learn more Samsung data recovery tips here shared by other authors in Data Recovery Salon.