I know a lot of people already asked about swapping HDD platters to save their data, but I have quite the opposite story.
I have a very old HDD (21 Mb, Conner CP-2024 if that is important). I got it with an old computer which I'm trying to restore out of pure curiosity. Due to its age (around 30 years) rubber gasket has completely disintegrated and it was full of dust on the inside. And when I say "full of dust" I literally mean it. The head was leaving traces on the dust. Sometimes the system can see the disk but sometimes it can't. My assumption is that the platter could have been damaged by all this dust.
The problem with this computer is that it seems to be able to work only with this particular disk. Its bios has only two settings "No disk"/"This exact disk".
So my question is if it's possible to swap a platter from a less old HDD of a different capacity and somehow initialise it, or is it something that only a factory can do? I don't care about the files on this disk at all, but I need the disk itself to be functional. Am I asking for impossible?
New (as in "not the one I have") CP-2024 seem to be very rare, I think I saw one on ebay for a few hundred US dollars a while ago. So I don't have the option "simply buy a new one" or "find the one having exactly the same model and firmware version" my only option is frankensteining it using something more modern. But any ideas are appreciated.
I have a very old HDD (21 Mb, Conner CP-2024 if that is important). I got it with an old computer which I'm trying to restore out of pure curiosity. Due to its age (around 30 years) rubber gasket has completely disintegrated and it was full of dust on the inside. And when I say "full of dust" I literally mean it. The head was leaving traces on the dust. Sometimes the system can see the disk but sometimes it can't. My assumption is that the platter could have been damaged by all this dust.
The problem with this computer is that it seems to be able to work only with this particular disk. Its bios has only two settings "No disk"/"This exact disk".
So my question is if it's possible to swap a platter from a less old HDD of a different capacity and somehow initialise it, or is it something that only a factory can do? I don't care about the files on this disk at all, but I need the disk itself to be functional. Am I asking for impossible?
New (as in "not the one I have") CP-2024 seem to be very rare, I think I saw one on ebay for a few hundred US dollars a while ago. So I don't have the option "simply buy a new one" or "find the one having exactly the same model and firmware version" my only option is frankensteining it using something more modern. But any ideas are appreciated.