Dead hard drive?

[sfj]

A couple of days ago an old Quantum Fireball 4.3G drive of mine stopped working. No strange noises, no error messages... it just didn't show up on the BIOS one morning. Preliminary investigation revealed that the drive wasn't even spinning up. I put it into an IDE to USB convertor, but to no avail. Nothing could see it.

Luckily all my important/critical/sentimental data had been backed up, but there are a few things on the drive I would like to retrieve. It's nothing worth spending stupid money on, so I'd like to have a go myself.

Apparently I have several options for home 'repair', which are, in increasing order of desperation:

1) Replace possibly broken PCB with identical PCB.

2) Chill drive in a refrigerator for several hours

3) Hit drive along axis of 'spindle'

4) Create 'clean room' in bathroom and attempt to swap platters with a working drive.


Does anyone on this board have any experience with retrieving data from so-called 'dead' drives? The only 'cause of death' clue I have is that the chips on the PCB get very hot even though the drive feels and sounds inactive.

 

[Eronarn]

2, then 3, then 1, then 4. Sorted based by ease.

 

[mczak]

I think option 1) is worth a try, 2) and 3) probably won't help much - could just as well throw it a couple of time across the room, you'll never know... 4) might be a fun project (and have chances of success) but I'd definitely try 1) first.
That said, obtaining an identical pcb might be tricky. Some hds ship with slightly different pcbs (or even only different bios) depending on revision, which afaik not necessarily are always compatible (same goes of course if you want to do option 4)).
In fact, I have a dead seagate (40GB Barracuta ATA IV) too, with exactly the same symptons as yours. It is dead now since a year though, and I planned using a pcb from an identical drive, but I didn't came across an identical hd yet, and the data wasn't worth enough to really try actively getting an identical hd...