Board and mechanism · bench notes · ADR-2025-3164
The Clicking Is the Heads. The Cover Stays On.
This man was acutely aware of the exact instant his drive began to fail. He described this instant vividly enough that it was worth more than most formal diagnoses. His PC was static on top of desk and started to click
, and from that point forward Windows reported drive/files not available
for the F: drive, the Seagate where he keeps everything, separate from the SSD (solid state drive) where the machine boots up. As one might expect in these circumstances, almost everyone's first reaction would be the same: remove the cover and inspect the heads. After all, clearly, a clicking drive has failed its heads. Clearly, heads are easy to see. Both parts of that statement are correct. It is the action taken based upon those statements that requires financial resources.
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What failed, and why.
Removing four screws takes about a minute; however, the real cost is what happens after you remove those screws. The reason is that the drive still has to run. That metal lid isn’t just a lid; it’s also part of a seal, and under it the heads fly within a couple of nanometres of the spinning platters. When you take off that lid, things look exactly like they did previously. However, you will get your bill later. Meanwhile the fault itself has not changed; the clicking continues because the heads are continuing to try to locate their references on the platters’ surface. Every time they make a pass across that surface, they are passing over the same areas the files are written to. Static shock damage can also affect the board; therefore, both are inspected and tested, but the clicking comes from the mechanism, whatever set it off.
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 | As both a mechanical issue and an electrical issue, we viewed the board under magnification before opening the drive up. | This allows access to the manufacturer's service area (where normal ATA commands cannot go) |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | We powered it using a current-limited source, so nothing was asked of it before it could answer. | Instead of working around the drive's firmware and controller, it works with the two natively |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | After rebuilding the volume from the image we created, we opened every file. | When other applications will not open it, this application will open APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs. |
What the bench did with it.
Nothing turns until the inside is clean
The best work was already done by him. Once he heard the disk start clicking, he immediately stopped hooking it up. This wasn’t just caution for caution’s sake. If there’s damage to the heads, every time you turn on the disk, it sends them flying back and forth over the platters’ surfaces again, and a disk that may otherwise have been readable in full becomes one that is only readable in parts. The disk arrived here in an un-powered state, and everything after that was performed using a current-limited source, watching the draw instead of guessing it.
Then find out what the static touched
When there is a discharge across a desk, it goes for the electronics, so the board was removed from the drive and placed in front of a magnifying glass prior to opening the mechanism. This practice helps both diagnostically and practically. When a damaged board is replaced by another board, all the adaptive data from the old board will need to travel across to the new board. If this does not happen, the mechanism bolted to the new board becomes unreadable. The board and mechanism were therefore treated as two separate jobs with two separate solutions.
The heads, and not before
Only once the mechanism is open can the heads and platters be viewed clearly. A matched set of heads was installed into the mechanism. Once these were aligned properly, the drive was asked to read for the first time since it started making the clicking noise. After this point imaging was carried out at a slow rate, as it was reasonably assumed that a drive that had made a clicking noise would have already used up some of what it had left.
What went home.
All of his data was recovered, and it was sent home on clean media. No components had been unscrewed and no operation had occurred on the drive since the clicking noise started. These reasons explain most of why the recovery proceeded as it did. His guess proved correct, and the course of action he took was better still.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Other jobs that began at the mains.
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.