Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


When users are going to replace heads or platters in a clean room environment to get the lost data back, it’s a must for these users to learn about each physical component what it is and how they work.

Today let’s check some of the most important physical components: Heads, Platters, PCB.

The platters contains the data and the heads contains read heads and write heads to read data from platters and write data to the platters. PCB is another very important physical component, it contains not only some of the firmware codes like ROM, but also controls the electrical components to offer power to the hard drive running. Read more

Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


When we are talking about dead hard drives, we usually refer to those which doesn’t spin up at all, no hdd working sounds, no response and they look dead. Actually some of these so-called dead hard drives are still alive and these drives can be still repaired and recovered.

If the driver IC is burnt, the PCB won’t power up at all, users can swap with one donor driver IC or swap the whole PCB with original ROM/bios chip transferred;

If the PCB is burnt or other electrical components of hard drives are burnt, the hard drives won’t be powered on and won’t spin up at all. At this time, users just need to find one compatible PCB with the same PCB number from the same family and put on the dead hard drives and then manage to regenerate the original ROM to recover the data;

If the motor of the dead hard drives is stuck, users need to disassemble the hard drives and remove the platters to a donor hard drive to read data from.

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Here we recommend one smart idea for people who wants to attend our advanced data recovery training courses-teaming purchase which is the only way to minimize the cost.

Users from the same city or even the same state or province or same country can team up together and find one local office and Dolphin Data Lab will send the data recovery training experts to the local office of the clients to offer the web listed advanced data recovery training courses.

How much is a basic Data Recovery class? It runs around $3800.00 for the week plus your air fair, hotel, and living expenses. You are looking at around $6000.00 to send one person for a weeks training. Read more

Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


We have recently received many inquiries asking to buy the head and platter swap tools from Dolphin Data Lab and some of them asked one question-is clean room a must for physical head replacement and platter swap?

According to our experience and many serious data recovery companies, the answer is definitely ‘yes’!

First, we must say data recovery is one serious art, to have one clean room or at least one clean bench will definitely maximize the physical data recovery success rate. To have one clean room or clean bench to handle the physically damaged hard drives such as head damaged hard drives, motor stuck hard drives or downgraded heads without r/w capabilities. Read more

Head and Platter Swap Tutorials


Physical head and platter swap is one of the most common data recovery cases and so far in the data recovery field, this kind of case is not for all data recovery engineers due to its complexity and requirement.

The key to get high success rate of head replacement and platter swap is continuing practice and learning from others’ experience;

To work on head and platter swap cases, users need firstly one clean room environment;

When users are swapping heads, users need to understand the hard drives with bad heads requiring data recovery from are usually called source drives or patient drives, the hard drives with matching good heads are usually called donor hard drives; Read more

This is right now a golden opportunity to those data recovery engineers who have summer holidays and it’s a good time to relax your brain, release your body and take care of your family and life and after the summer holidays engineers can start again their data recovery business with fresh ideas and energy.

It’s a pity Dolphin Data Lab doesn’t have the summer holidays and keep working all the standard working days and hours and we keep researching on some new data recovery tools and solutions and when engineers come back from the summer holidays, engineers can enjoy working with these new stuff. Read more