Portable drives · impact damage · ADR-2025-2858
It Was Working When It Reached the Floor.
The drive was doing nothing unusual at the time. It was plugged into my lap top and was working fine
, he says, when he moved the laptop and the Expansion went with it — fell on the floor (from about knee height) and unplugged
on the way down. He put it back in to see what would happen. It now makes a beeping sound
, and it no longer appears on the computer at all. Everything he counts as important was on that drive.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
Where the heads are at the moment of impact decides almost everything after it. A drive sitting idle has parked them off the platters, and a knock in that condition is often survivable with nothing to show for it. This one was working. The platters were turning, the heads were flying over recorded surface at a height measured in nanometres, and a floor arriving at that instant is the worst thing that can happen to one. The beeping afterwards is the mechanism reporting that it cannot get started: the motor draws, the platters do not come up to speed, it gives up and tries again. Putting it back in once is understandable. Doing so repeatedly asks a head that may already be resting on the surface to be dragged across it, and that is how a job about heads becomes a job about platters.
What the bench did with it.
The order of the job →| Equipment used | Its work on this job | The reason for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Read once the mechanism turned again, gently and one surface at a time | Heads mapped first, then one platter side to a pass, with every reset, every timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Bench power and native access first, with the draw watched throughout | Works with the drive's firmware and controller directly rather than around them |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | The volume rebuilt off the finished copy and his own files brought out of it | Opens APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs when other software will not |
What the bench did with it.
It beeped once here and was not asked to do it twice
Nothing was plugged in to reproduce the noise; it had already been heard and it says what it says. Power came from a bench supply that limits current and shows the draw, which is how a mechanism that cannot turn is identified without being made to try. Past the enclosure board, the drive was reached directly, so that every decision after that was ours rather than an operating system's.
Open it in clean air and look before deciding anything
The cover was lifted under laminar flow and the heads and spindle were examined beneath a stereo microscope, because what an impact did to a running drive is a question of millimetres and cannot be settled from outside the case. That inspection is what tells you whether this is a mechanism to work on or a set of surfaces to work around. A matched donor head assembly was fitted, and the drive was turned again only when there was something for it to read with.
Read it once, at whatever rate it offers
A mechanism that has been through an impact and then been given new heads is not a repaired drive. It is a drive that will read for a while, and the copying ran on that assumption. Retries were capped, hesitations were logged and revisited on a slower pass afterwards, and the surfaces were worked one at a time rather than in one sweep. Nothing was asked of it twice while there was still ground it had not been asked for once.
What went home.
His important files were read out of the copy, opened here, and sent home on new media. The Expansion is finished with; a drive rebuilt with somebody else's parts is a means to an end and not something to keep using. The single-drive band published on this site, £300 + VAT, applied, and work that opens a drive carries a deposit against parts and labour before it begins.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Further portable-drive jobs, written up.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
Prices are published and fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are priced at £250 + VAT. A drive on its own comes to £300 + VAT. Anything holding a second disk, whether RAID, NAS or a server, opens at £500 + VAT. The first look costs nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed and in writing before a penny is charged. Switch it off and post it in. Most jobs carry no fee where no files return.