Need advise on swapping drive interface cards

[ab2003]

I have a DiamondMax Plus 60, 30GB ATA100 7200rpm hard drive that failed at sea when the ship's communication radio, broadcasting at 12MHz, engaged a linear amplifier to increase range. The resulting gain in transmitter output power was awesome. The ground plane was saturated causing everything metallic on board to vibrate at a resonant frequency. The ensuing one sided conversation could be heard like a scratchy old telephone in the duct work and bulkheads all over the ship, and from the case of the computer. It was the last recognizable data sequence processed through the hard drive. The rest of the system, quite surprisingly, is fine.

The toasted drive does not spin up and is not recognized by BIOS or by Maxtor's troubleshooting software.

When the ATA100 interface card is replaced with an older ATA66 interface card from a 5400rpm drive, BIOS recognizes the card and the drive spins up. The ATA66 interface card can never be expected to read data stored at ATA100, 7200rpm geometry, but the fact that the drive spins up and communicates with BIOS spawns the slim hope that the drive could become functional again with a proper ATA100, 7200rpm interface card.

Maxtor does not sell interface cards, however. That leaves me with 3 options:
1. Buy another DiamondMax Plus 60 hard drive and cannibalize the card.
2. Buy any ATA100, 7200rpm drive and swap out the platters.
3. Send the drive to a data recovery service.

Option 3 is cost prohibitive at $500.
Options 1 and 2 would only cost $100 but I am not sure they would work. Neither the drive nor the interface card is designed to be interchangeable. They only have to work with each other.

Still I would expect there is a procedure to accommodate variances in production hardware timing by providing a method to synchronize data processing events on the card with the real time mechanical constants of the drive. Such a procedure would make interface card swapping a viable option

Any feedback on interface card alignment or swapping as a method of data recovery would be appreciated. I am a technician with Intel and can perform the rework in a clean room environment.

Spinning out thanks
ab2003

 

[edfair]

Even in a clean room environment I would suspect that option 2 is not viable. I haven't seen any specs on it, but I would doubt that surface to surface track alignment would be held to tight enough tolerance to make the back side reliable, if readable at all.
Option 1 is probably viable if you can get the same production lot, or close to it. And if it does't work you still have a good drive to have data transferred to when you use option 1.
But let us know how it works out. And good luck.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.