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Making more teardowns of an object already torndown?

Okey-Doke

I recently got this old ASUS PC from some guy outside Best Buy he was going to recycle, and it had an HDD failure and with that replaced it's all good. Now I have a hard drive that needs to be wiped (by tearing it down) as it is no good anyway.

This Teardown already exists: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Quantum+...

Is this OK or is this frowned upon?

I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 750GB. I most likely will make this one with the same "professionalism" as my other guides, with halfway decent lighting and a white background.

If this is made,

@nick Since you seem to know a lot about storage medium, I will give you editing permissions. If you do edit anything, tell me. @oldturkey03 you have editing permissions as usual.

Also, anyone know an ideal bar for minimum rep to edit? I typically use 1000 or 2000 below my rep.

@evan @avanteguarde @pccheese

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Heads Up!

That guide will be VERY delayed. Fell down the stairs (I'm OK) with my laptop bag and my laptop display shattered. I don't have the money for the parts, as drops are not covered by the warranty. most likely I won't be online any time soon as I very much prefer the desktop over mobile. I'll see what I can do though.

Bye for now!

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(Semi) late comment but what I've done is started on a phone as a really rough draft, especially if I'm doing what is effectively a entire rewrite anyway.

Doing the final work on a phone or tablet** sucks, but it's workable for the draft, since you're going to be cleaning it up later anyway. Mobile is generally terrible for serious work; I agree with you on that much.

** Tablets with keyboards are usable, but you need one with a integrated keyboard from day one OR a BT keyboard and a stand case.

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Go for it!

You can make either a teardown (more entertaining, may gloss over some details) or a disassembly guide (a repair guide with the express purpose of fully taking something apart).

You may find there are differences between your process and the existing guide. Feel free to explicitly talk about those differences in the introduction to your guide.

Also, when writing your guide, you don't need to pretend the other guide doesn't exist. Feel free to reference the other one as needed, if you feel that your guide is lacking in instructions or images.

Best of luck!

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Thanks! will probably have it up in the next few days.

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As far as non patrol edit permissions, my rule is to make it high enough to prevent new/inactive users from editing without going through Patrol but not preventing experienced users from editing without approval. This is why I set it to 10k for normal guides and 20k for guides I want to take more precautions with.

I'm guessing it's a C2D system since it had a 7200.12 drive. That drive was released to replace the nightmare 7200.11 (it has a tendency to lock in a BSY state) and typically doesn't show in the BIOS in that condition. It was more effective then the .11 firmware patch, but it still happened; just less often. I've seen some years later that fail to load the SMART data as well; the .11/.12 drives were both impacted.

If I had to guess at the failure it probably had a BSY failure rather then a mechanical failure. However, the drives are old enough it's now a plausible theory. Seeing 7200.11/12 is enough to get me to replace it regardless of functionality.

I've thought about doing a teardown of a drive (and have some pictures from a dead 7200.11) but I never did anything with it. I figured someone would pick up where I left off and I wish you the best in doing what I never did.

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What is a BSY?

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Busy state. The drive gets stuck in that state without warning at random and it can happen at any time. It's a nasty firmware bug that happened on a lot of drives. The problem is well known. Most of these drives are no longer in use (either due to whole system replacement or early failure and the drive was hopefully replaced with a stable drive). If the drive somehow works and isn't dead (and you need the data), it's best to move the data and clone while you have a chance. It could be your only working window before it happens. Some people recovered them with a Nokia CA-42 cable and Hyperterminal but that operation could be deadly if you get it wrong.

It's known as the BSY bug. You need to use something like a PC-3000 to verify if it's mechanical or a BSY bug crash with certainty. If the drive works and isn't clicking, but doesn't show in the BIOS it's probably the BSY bug. I've also seen them fail to poll SMART, which is probably a early warning. The 7200.11 I had was using HP6 firmware and they never patched it.

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Aiden will be eternally grateful.