Older disks · head fault · ADR-2025-3157
You Could Have Set a Watch by It.
They had counted it, and that made this simple. The FreeAgent is at least 15 years old
, still powers on, and no longer identifies itself to Windows
. Instead, it simply produces quiet clicking sounds in a pattern that repeats every 4 seconds or so
. This is not knocking, nor is it grinding, and it is doubtful anyone could hear it clearly across a room. Much of what was contained within it, they did not need to keep. What they desperately needed was the quite a lot of family photos
, and there was no other copy of these.
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What failed, and why.
The rhythmic noise is an example of a machine’s repetitive motion. Every four seconds, the heads go out to find the servo info (which indicates their location) and when they don’t see anything that will work for them, they retreat back to a known area and try again, and the amount of time that elapses before they retry is the interval. As for the drive no longer identifying itself to Windows, this too is due to the same problem as above. A drive that can’t read cannot get far enough to identify itself. The age factor is the other half. At fifteen years of age, the lubricant, bearings and head assembly have aged to the point of having fewer attempts left, regardless of the diagnosis.
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 | Donor heads graded after installation, and the sequence of access determined by the output provided by them | 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 | Accessing one surface at a time, at a rate established here and not by the drive | Instead of working around the drive's firmware and controller, it works with the two natively |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Directory structure recreated using the duplicate, and photographs opened individually by eye | When other applications will not open it, this application will open APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs. |
What the bench did with it.
One metered start, and count what it does
It was connected once to a current-limited supply, with the draw recorded on a trace, and then disconnected and allowed to sit idle. The sequence described in exact detail was seen during operation: the motor reached maximum speed and maintained it, and over that a small regular signature appeared approximately every four seconds as the actuator extended outward and returned with no data available. This was the final time the drive operated on its original heads.
Open it once, and open it prepared
The surfaces were examined under magnification first. The marking on the surface was faint and restricted to a narrow band. This describes what you see on a drive if its owners count the noise (and do not argue with it) instead of attempting to get it working. A head assembly that matches was substituted into the drive, alignment was established and the individual heads were evaluated prior to requesting any sectors.
Photographs first, everything else afterwards
We had already been told what was important to them, thus the reading order followed that importance: the regions containing photographs were read first in their own passes, with the weaker head deferred until the stronger head had retrieved as many accessible sectors as it could. All other regions of the disk were deferred until after both strong and weak heads had completed their respective passes. The only true control over how much material can be recovered from a drive of this age is in that ordering, since nothing about a repaired mechanism of this age owes anything to you.
What went home.
All photographs were transferred to brand-new media. Rather than counting the photographs, we opened them. A second set of photographs was created and also sent with them. The FreeAgent has been decommissioned. The reason why this was successful is simply that no one tried to determine if it ever stabilised by plugging it in over a couple of weeks.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
More Apple machines, written up.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
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