Second opinions · job record · ADR-2025-3161
The Shop Said No Good, and Gave It Back.
Her Dell had stopped finding its own disk — hard drive could not be found
— so she did the ordinary thing and took it to a repair shop. They were straight with her about what they could do. The shop advised the hard drive was no good
and that he could not recover my files
, fitted a new disk so she had a working machine again, and handed the old one back to her. That last part is the reason this entry has an ending at all. What was on it was the usual accumulation of a working life: files, photos and emails
, and none of it anywhere else.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
A shop's verdict is honest and narrow. Their question is whether a disk is fit to keep using, and the answer there was plainly no. Whether the data can be read is another question, settled on other equipment: a shop has tools for working computers, not for reaching firmware or imaging past sectors that will not answer. No good means beyond this bench. A disk the machine cannot find has failed to present itself, and that is firmware, electronics or mechanism — the three things a recovery bench exists to address. Handing it back rather than discarding it kept this possible. One disk is £300 + VAT, and the assessment costs nothing.
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 | Imaged behind a write blocker with retries held short wherever it read | Heads mapped first, then one platter side to a pass, with every reset, every timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Reached the firmware and the fault conditions a general bench cannot get to | Gets into the manufacturer's service area, where ordinary ATA commands cannot go |
| R-Studio Technician | Mail and photographs opened out of the image once the volume was rebuilt | Puts an array back together from the images, and reads nearly every file system |
What the bench did with it.
No more attempts with general tools
The disk arrived having been tried once and then let alone, which is close to the best condition one of these can be in. Here it saw a current-monitored supply and nothing else while its behaviour was established: whether it would identify at all, what its firmware had to report, and what its own health figures said about it. Only after that was there a fault to name, and a number to put beside it.
Name the fault before choosing the route
Two routes lead out of that assessment and they do not cost the same. Where a disk reads, it is imaged behind a write blocker with retry limits set low and difficult areas deferred. Where the mechanism is at fault, it goes into clean air first and matched donor parts are fitted under magnification. Which of the two applies is established rather than assumed.
Her mail and her photographs, opened one by one
The file system was parsed from the image rather than from the disk, and everything that came out of it was opened here: photographs rendered, mail loaded into a reader, documents opened here and there through the tree. A recovery reported as a file count is not a report. She had already been given one verdict without much behind it, and a second of the same kind would have been no use to her.
What went home.
Her files, her photographs and her mail went home on new media, checked before they left. The shop had done nothing wrong in any of this: it answered the question it was asked, fitted a working disk, and had the sense to hand the old one back. That last decision is the one that mattered, and it is the one people most often get wrong.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Other desktop disks on the log.
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.