Files that will not read · bench log · ADR-2025-2861
One Piece of Advice Kept It Readable.
It had stopped working a few days ago
, and what she went on to describe afterwards is what decided the job. The drive itself was still present. She could access the hard drive
and see it, open it, but the files were a different story altogether; every one she tried to access returned an I/O Device error
and would go no further, regardless of which machine she tried. Approximately a terabyte was on a Seagate 2TB external drive and was nowhere else. And then the line that mattered most, in her own words: haven't tried scanning the external hard drive due to advice
. Someone had advised her to leave it alone, and she had.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
That error message is another way of saying the drive cannot provide the requested information. It does not say why it can't. There are two completely different scenarios presented using the same exact words: a table of indexes that has lost its place on a perfectly healthy drive, or a surface that is no longer capable of providing what was placed upon it. Of these, only the second is going to punish you for guessing. Windows will ask if you want to check the drive, and when you tell it yes, it's going to read across every area of the drive and write corrections along the way; this is hours of heavy work for a failing drive, and it is pointed directly at the weakest point. A failing drive goes from slow to silent in just one night of that type of use. She had been told to leave it alone and she did.
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 | The failed drive was imaged using limited retries, difficult areas were noted, and they were deferred until later | 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 |
| R-Studio Technician | Volume opened from the image. Never opened directly from the disk. | Constructs an array from the images, and reads nearly every file system |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Profiling first: how did it answer? Where did it slow? Which sectors had already given up returning data? | This allows access to the manufacturer's service area (where normal ATA commands cannot go) |
What the bench did with it.
Find out how it reads before asking it for anything
There was no scanning done, nor was anything fixed. Instead, the failed drive was tested: how quickly it responds to requests, where it slows down, which sectors have stopped sending data, and what numbers its internal diagnostics say regarding how quickly those failures are spreading. That gives us a picture of how much reading the drive still has left in it, and that is what tells us how aggressive we need to be with our imaging.
A ceiling on retries, because retries cost the drive
All limits were established prior to moving a single sector. Timeouts were set low, all retry limits were established and all areas of the media that pushed back were recorded, bypassed, and left undisturbed. All un-recovered areas received one quick pass at the end once the easy reading was done. This is a budget approach and not a competition. If we spend an hour trying to read one sector that will not read, that is an hour the drive may not have.
Read it once, then leave the drive alone
The Seagate was turned off immediately after its copy was verified, and it remained in that state. All subsequent operations were performed using that copy: the file system was accessed via the copy, the directories were navigated via the copy, and all output was examined rather than enumerated. Although a list proves that the file's name survives, opening the file itself proves that the file exists. What could not be read accumulated in a small number of locations, and their corresponding filename lists appear in the report.
What went home.
Most of that terabyte went home on new media as per the original directory structure, and the report details those items that did not. Each item will have an individual entry; therefore, she knows exactly which items to go searching for elsewhere. The remainder of this write-up belongs to the advice she was given. A drive returning errors on every file has only a finite number of reads available, and very few of hers had been used prior to reaching the bench. She paid the standard rate for one disk, as published (£300 + VAT), and had it in writing beforehand.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
More jobs where files would not show and volumes would not read.
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.