Portable drives · impact damage · ADR-2025-2858
It Was Working When It Reached the Floor.
At the time of failure, there was nothing abnormal occurring with the drive. It was plugged into my lap top and was working fine
, he said, when he moved the laptop and the Expansion went with it; it fell on the floor (from about knee height) and unplugged
during its descent. He plugged it back in to determine if it still functioned properly, and it now makes a beeping sound
and is completely invisible on the computer. Everything he considered important existed on this drive.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
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What failed, and why.
Almost anything that happens to a drive after a fall depends entirely on where the heads are at the point of contact. An idle drive has parked its heads off the platter, and an impact in that state is often survivable and leaves little evidence. This one was operational as it fell, which is much worse. The platters were spinning, the heads were flying past recorded surfaces at heights measured in nanometres, and hitting the floor at that moment is the worst thing that can happen to a head. After the fall, the beeping is the mechanism trying to tell you that it cannot start. The motor draws, but the platters never reach full speed, it quits and tries again. Plugging it back in once is reasonable. Doing it twice, three times or more will ask a head that might already be lying flat on the surface to slide back and forth across it. And this is how a job involving heads turns into a job involving 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 drive turned again, gently and only one surface at a time | Mapped the heads first, then imaged one face of a platter per pass, with every reset, timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Native access and bench power are done first (and the draw is monitored all along) | Instead of working around the drive's firmware and controller, it works with the two natively |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | This rebuild was based upon the finished copy, and his own files were extracted from it | When other applications will not open it, this application will open APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs. |
What the bench did with it.
It beeped once here and was not asked to do it twice
There was nothing connected to simulate the noise; the noise had already been heard, and it said what it said. The power was supplied by a bench supply that can limit current as well as display the amount drawn by the device. This method of testing allows a mechanism that cannot turn to be identified without making it try. Once past the enclosure board, we could reach the drive itself directly, therefore all of the decisions regarding the drive were ours instead of the operating system's.
Open it and look before deciding anything
The top cover was removed, allowing us to inspect the heads and spindle underneath a stereo microscope. Since what happened to a running drive due to an impact is a question of millimetres and cannot be determined by examining the exterior of the case, this examination told us whether this was a mechanism worth working on or just a set of surfaces to work around. A matched donor head assembly was then installed, and only when there was something for it to read with did we power it back on again.
Read it once, at whatever rate it offers
An impacted drive that has received a new head assembly is not a fixed or working drive. Rather, it is a drive that will read for a time. Therefore, we operated on this assumption during the subsequent copy. We limited retries; logged hesitations and revisited them later on a slower pass; and processed each surface individually rather than trying to process all surfaces in one sweep. Additionally, we never asked anything of it twice while there was still unexplored territory.
What went home.
We extracted his important files from the copy, opened them here, and sent them back home on new media. The Expansion is finished with; a drive rebuilt using someone else's parts is simply a means to an end and should be used no further. The single-drive band published on this website (£300 + VAT) applied, and work that opens up a drive carries a deposit for 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.
Published prices are fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. Any stand-alone drive is £300 + VAT. Drive configurations containing multiple disks (RAID, NAS or server) start at £500 + VAT. First assessments are always complimentary. Thereafter, data recovery charges are also fixed in advance and in writing, so you'll always know how much you owe before paying any money. Shut it down, get a quote first (by phone or with the form), then send it in or drop it off at our Guildford intake laboratory, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed). On most jobs you only pay if we recover your data.