"J. Clarke" wrote in message
wrote:

I have a no-name (Platinum) 160GB 7200RPM hard drive that has had some
sort of physical failure. The bios sees it, but any reads from the
drive result in errors or time out. I have tried many hard drive tools
to try to recover the data, but all point to a physical failure. The
drive is not making the normal 'clicking' sound, but I can hear a
repetitive sound as if it's trying, and failing, to access the same spot.

That's recalibration--it's either dealing with a marginal sector that is not
quite to the point of being marked bad or something has gone wrong in the
read circuitry so that all attempts at reads give the appearance to the
firmware of being reads of bad sectors.

In the past, I've always just RMA'd drives that had physical
failures if they were under warranty, or trashed them otherwise. This
time, I would like to try and see if I can fix the drive myself. The
data on there is not super important, but I would like to recover it if
possible. I'm willing to try anything to fix the drive, including
opening it, since it is no longer under warranty.

So, I guess my questions a
1) Has anyone here ever fixed a drive with a physical problem?

It's been done.

2) Any guesses as to what component on the drive has most likely failed?

The platter is most likely. If so you don't have a prayer of fixing it--the
only possible repair is to read everything _else_ off of it,

and if the sector the drive is trying to read is one that the drive needs in
order to start

It's recognized by BIOS so obviously it passed that point.

then you're going to have to rewrite the firmware to not need that sector,

In this case, just overwriting it.

which is for an individual whose understanding of disks is such
that he has to ask questions here going to be a huge undertaking.

It _may_ be that you have lucked out and it's an electronics problem, in
which case replacing the circuit board with one from an identical drive
might fix the problem.

3) Any websites detailing the steps to fix a physical hard drive
problem? (Google has been no help so far)

Not really.

No 'details' but real people to help guide:
http://forums.actionfront.com/


4) I know I could probably take this to some place and pay them
thousands of dollars to recover the data on it. So I'm wondering what
approach they take and if any of their techniques can be done at home
without expensive equipment.

The only thing you can try that's not going to be expensive would be to swap
out the controller, and don't bet on that working.

Note that some of the recovery services now have reasonably low cost
recovery available if you're willing to sit at the bottom of the priority
queue for however long it takes.

5) Any other suggested groups to crosspost to?

Thanks.

--Phillip