HELP! External hard drive platter locked up solid!

[R 6UY S]

Hi i'm really hoping someone can help me out here. I've been an idiot and moved my external hard drive while it was running. It wasn't transfering any data at the time but it was switched on and the disk was spinning. When i moved it i could feel the spinning disk's gyroscopic (spelt right?) effect and then wham the drive pulled round and i felt and heard the disk stop suddenly! I have taken it apart and the disk platter is locked up solid. I'm sure this is not normal. But to be honest i've never had one apart before. If i was to buy another drive the same (identical make and model) would i be able to simply swop the platters over and be able to access my data? It has 3 platters and i read you cannot move these out of rotation or you will loose your data for good? The data is really important as its the drive i back EVERYTHING up to and i only re installed my computer yesterday. :-( by the way it is an Hitachi Deskstar 500GB drive. Please someone help me as i feel physically sick at the thought of loosing everything. Many thanks in advance. A very upset Guy.

[PJ S]

If the platter is fine - no head parked on it - then your data will be fine.
However, stripping and reassembling a new drive with the old platters might work enough for you to get the data off, but as they're assembled in cleanrooms, then there's likely to be a fair bit of airborne debris picked up through static cling.
Would be cheaper than a data recovery specialist, that's for sure, but both drives will be only fit for the bin once you've finished recovering.

[Ian_T]

You opened the drive? Realistically, then, you have little chance of recovering anything yourself.. There will be so much crud on it now, the heads will have real problems reading anything.

[buggalugs]

Normaly when a drive's off the heads will move over to one side but the platters with still spin freely, the main point to get across here though is that if you want to get any of the stuff off it again then put the top back on without touching anything and give Ontrack a call. They'll charge you £70 or so to have a look at it and tell you if they can do anything with it. If it won't spin up and the tops been off then you're beyond anything that can be done at home now, in my opinion anything more you try to do will only make it worse at this point. Give Ontrack a call, hope it works out for you.