The Repair Myth

Some professionals or even companies announce that they ”repair“ hard drives. We know that it’s impossible, because such professionals and companies don’t even have a proper place for doing so.

What they do, in fact, is change the logic board and/or run a program that hides the bad sectors, the famous ”bad blocks“ (read our tutorial on this subject). Then they give you the formatted hard disk and tell you it’s been ”fixed“.

There’s the refurbishing industry – or even better, recycling – in countries such as India, China and Russia, but in this case the hard drives come without brand or with some mark or tag that says ”refurbished“ or remanufactured. We’ve seen hard drives of that kind work for some years and others for some months. Those disks, however, were really rebuilt by using parts from more than one disk, some new and some used, and they are good for use in low-income countries, because they’re much cheaper.

What we want to say is that both refurbished and ”fixed“ hard disk aren’t reliable. If they’re used, they would never store important data, but just be used to surf the Internet or as station disk without any important data.

The Platter Swapping Myth

Some people have already told us that they’ve read in some place or have heard someone say that it’s possible to recover data from a defective disk simply by finding another one that’s exactly the same and transferring the ”platters“ (media, without the heads) from one HDA (Hard Drive Assembly) to the other.

This can even work if we take into consideration certain factors such as firmware, hard disk drive series, and others. However, the most likely is that data is lost forever due to many other reasons such as inappropriate environment, inadequate technique and tools, anyway, everything you shouldn’t do for absolute lack of condition and knowledge. But, as we always say, luck is a reality.