Well I was drunk when I wrote that, probably why I froze the drive even though the TORX were due to arrive the next day so I could swap out the PCB. Anologue controllers, I thought, measured the voltage and when you move your increasing the resistance, dropping the voltage. So even though your pulling a trigger in to make say a car accelerate your dropping the voltage running to the chip and it gets translated as how much you want between 0% and 100%.

Either way the drive looks screwed.

I actually had to wait for the drive to thaw out a bit because it was so cold it wouldnt move, my fingers even got stuck to it when I took it out the freezer after about 3hrs. It was a fail.

I swapped the PCBs and the PCB still worked the new drive.

For the finale I cleaned and hoovered all surfaces, closed the door to my computer room, slapped on a pair of medical gloves and put the extractor on full blast and opened it up.

The top platter has 2 massive rings on it and the heads just jump between them. The heads go into the ramp and move ok on their own, all except reading the actual disk.

Conclusion: Platters are boned so theres nothing I can do except rebuild the collection of things I need and now I have a spare set of heads for my new HDD.

I think in the end all that I've really lost is a couple of months of pics. I can rewrite my CV, redo my projects and at least now I dont have 3500 or so links. Its probably actually a good thing because now I dont have tons of absolutely useless crap lying about that "I'll sort out next week". Been saying that for about 2 years now. Apart from a few things theres nothing I cant research or find again. Also I have about 590GB left to fill now.