Hard Drive Modding: How to Void Your Warranty in 20 Minutes or Less - The Victim
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Our victim today, as I said earlier, is a Maxtor 80 GB 7200 RPM IDE Hard Disk Drive. Please note all the pretty warning stickers and information on the top of the drive, because when we’re done we won’t be seeing anything but platter and actuator arm.
The first thing to do was to remove the screws holding the top cover on. On this hard drive there were six screws holding the top plate to the rest of the hard drive casing. These were not ordinary screws, though. I needed to dig into my electronics tool box to find the various and not commonly used screwdriver bits that came with a tool set a few years ago. Finding my smallest eight-pointed star head bit (I have no proper name for it), I set to removing all six of the screws. Upon having done so I found that the cover still wasn’t coming off.
Rather than yanking and pulling on the cover, I decided to look over the plate and see what I could find. I found it curious that the plate had a rounded divot in its surface and after removing the sticker in the middle of it found my problem. They had mischievously hidden the last screw underneath that sticker. Sneaky.
Once that screw was removed and set aside, I resisted the urge to pull the cover off immediately. I didn’t want to lose any these tiny little screws so I quickly found an unused drawer in my standing screw box and carefully stowed them away. I would need them later after all.
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