Is that not all old ‘hard drives’ like before SSD ones or did I misrecall something? Like anything with a platter. Anything newer would be solid state right? Maybe I was more commercial drives, did have that in my background but it’s been a decade now heh.
Oh I was thinking more about bad springs and arms than the platters themselves for that part (okay I’m not sure why or if I saw but I believe the old ones used springs in some function maybe the arms so quite old memory at this point don’t quote me), the moveable stuff that can wear out easier. A more specialized repair if possible, not the platters themselves though without losing the data.
There are USB and sata floppy drives. As for tech support? If it doesn’t work then warranty or replace, there isn’t much else you do with drives beyond that for modern drives either (unless I’ve missed something by not paying attention for years). I may be wrong on the last point, think some hard drives may be repairable but don’t think it was common for consumer level stuff. The worst case is probably a stuck disk that loses it’s protector then gets replaced, both the drive and the disk when copied over.
I’ve rewritten much of my code as needs changed, I call myself an idiot a lot since I’ve worked on this program nearly a decade and was my first professional software so often change old code I wrote. Though it was more additional at first since I used a lot of code the lead programmer did. Though he duplicated everything as needed for a tiny change ugh. Least I know how not to do it.