Do-It-Yourself Hard Disk Drive Data Recovering, Repairing, Upgrading & Modding

Need to recover, upgrade or repair a damaged hard disk drive? Missing a service manual? Want to resurrect the data from a broken or dead storage device? Here is a collection of free take apart instructions, disassembly pictures, upgrade and repair manuals, recovery HOWTOs as well as do-it-yourself (DIY) tips and tricks for computer hard disk drives.

If you have written a free hard disk drive repair guide yourself (or if you know of instructions not linked here), please submit a new entry.

You may data find recovery tips for HDD made by these manufacturers:

• Conner: ... see SeaGate (not yet)
• ExcelStor: ... (not yet)
• Fujitsu: ... (not yet)
• Hewlett-Packard HP: ...
• Hitachi: TravelStar, DeskStar, UltraStar, MicroDrive
• IBM: ... see Hitachi
• Maxtor: ...
• Quantum: FireBall
• Samsung: SpinPoint (not yet)
• Seagate: ...
• Toshiba: ... (not yet)
• Western-Digital: Caviar, WD, Scorpio, Raptor

Instructions for Solid State Drives - SSDs and other data storage devices are not yet included.

Joe Grand, Ryan Russell, Kevin Mitnick (Editor): Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty, 2004

"Grand, president and CEO of a product design and development firm, shows how to modify personal computer and electronics equipment at the hardware level. He describes essential tools for hardware hacking and reviews electrical engineering basics, then gives instructions, illustrated with b&w photos, for modifying the CueCat, building a custom Terabyte FireWire hard drive, taking apart the Mac, hacking Atari and PlayStation 2 systems, and upgrading memory on palm devices. Final chapters overview operating systems and introduce basic concepts of coding."


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