PC911 > How-To > For Bits And Giggles > Cleaning Your Hard Drive

Page 1: Logically, this is the first page
Page 2: Dismantling the drive
Page 3: Bits and pieces
Page 4: Flossing is important
Page 5: Reassemble, reconnect, pull your hair out

Dismantling the drive

To get into the guts of the hard drive, you need to remove several screws located at the top of the drive. But where are they? Hard drive manufacturers think we're stoopid. They put little stickers over the screws to hide them and write "Don't remove" on the sticker so we won't find the screws. Not very user friendly. Go ahead and locate any stickers on your drive that say something like "Caution - Don't remove this label!" and remove them. This might void the warranty on the drive, but I figure the warranty on this baby here expired about 5 years ago anyway, so who cares?

Remove all the screws that you can find hidden underneath stickers at the top of the drive. Then take the lid off of the drive. This is where a flat-head screwdriver comes in handy because for some reason they not only screw, but also glue that lid on real tight. Again, not very user friendly, but that won't stop us.

Check out the shiny disks! If this is your first disk cleaning, take a look around and check out the read/write heads, the platters, and mechanics of your drive. Pretty cool, ain't it? Give it a nice blast with the compressed air to clean out the worst dirt before we continue.

Page 1: Logically, this is the first page
Page 2: Dismantling the drive
Page 3: Bits and pieces
Page 4: Flossing is important
Page 5: Reassemble, reconnect, pull your hair out