Knocks and impact · lab log · ADR-2025-3663
It Went Over, and It Still Sounds Right.
The drive has fallen over
, and that was the whole account of the accident, which is usually all anybody can give. He put it into an enclosure afterwards and it can't be read by my other laptop
: powering up but not then connecting to the other laptop
. So it draws power, it gives every outward sign of being unharmed, and no volume ever appears. On it were videos of his son, who had passed away in June, along with documents and downloads. There was no second copy of any of it.
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What failed, and why.
Before a volume appears, a sequence has to complete. The motor brings the platters up to speed. The heads read the drive's own firmware and calibrate against it. The drive identifies itself. Only then has the enclosure's bridge anything to hand a computer. Power was arriving here and the drive got no further than that, so the failure sits somewhere along the sequence, and the knock is what makes it worth being careful. A drive that has been over can fail at any of those stages, and where the reason is mechanical, every further attempt to connect it flies the heads across the surfaces again. Sounding normal is not evidence. It is the absence of one particular kind of evidence, and on a drive that has been knocked it is worth nothing at all.
What the bench did with it.
The order of the job →| Equipment used | Its work on this job | The reason for it |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Asked to identify on a current-limited supply, the draw profiled first | Gets into the manufacturer's service area, where ordinary ATA commands cannot go |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Read through the caddy's own board first, to tell an enclosure fault from a drive fault | Reads through the caddy's own USB board rather than round it, and at the pace the bridge allows |
| R-Studio Technician | The volume rebuilt off the image, and the video files opened and played through | Puts an array back together from the images, and reads nearly every file system |
What the bench did with it.
Sounding right proves nothing at all
Start-up current, the time it took to be ready, and what it did along the way were all measured before a command went near it. Twenty minutes on the meters separates a job that can be run at speed from one that gets a single careful attempt, and after a knock nothing distinguishes those two by ear.
Take the enclosure out of the question
A drive that powers without presenting may be failing at the drive, or it may be a bridge board doing nothing useful. Those look identical from a desk and are easy to separate here: read it through the caddy's own board first, then reach the mechanism directly. Only one of the two answers involves opening anything, and it is worth knowing which before it is opened rather than after.
Image it once, gently, and work from the copy
Imaging ran with retries held down and the difficult ground left to a closing pass, on the assumption that a drive which has been over has less in reserve than it looks. Everything after that was done from the copy rather than the original. The videos were opened and played through rather than counted, because a file that will not play has not come back, whatever the listing says.
What went home.
The videos went home on fresh media, played through here before they left, with the documents and downloads alongside them. Nothing in the way that drive presented itself would have told anybody how much was riding on it, which is why one that arrives after a knock is treated as though something is.
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.
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.