Physical damage · terms first · ADR-2025-3677
Damaged, Turned Down, and Still Holding the Day.
One drive held the record of a wedding, and it had been physically damaged. That much he knew. What the damage amounted to he did not, and the local repair shop can't help
had been read in the house as a verdict rather than as a boundary. It is his wife's drive. He blames himself for what happened to it, and there was no second copy of the wedding photos along with many
other things the two of them cared about. What he asked for was the honest position rather than reassurance, and on a damaged drive nobody can give that position until the damage has been looked at under magnification.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
A repair shop saying it cannot help is describing its own bench rather than the drive. Shops fix computers. Physical damage to a drive wants clean air, donor parts and imaging hardware, and none of the three belongs in a shop, so what he had read as a verdict was a boundary. Physically damaged covers several faults, though, and they are not interchangeable. An impact can harm the heads and spare the platters. A connector can break with the mechanism untouched. A board can be damaged while everything behind it is sound. Each has a different route and a different price, and no honest answer exists until the damage has been examined under magnification. That is also why a drive in this state is not run in the meantime: a damaged mechanism marks platters, and a damaged board fails further. Where the platters have been marked, recovery narrows to what is still readable, and that is said plainly at the start rather than discovered at the end. A single drive is £300 + VAT, published and fixed, the assessment is not charged for, and clean-air work carries a deposit against parts and labour.
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 the drive itself what state it was in, over its own service port | Gets into the manufacturer's service area, where ordinary ATA commands cannot go |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaged with the areas holding the photographs read first | Works with the drive's firmware and controller directly rather than around them |
| R-Studio Technician | The Mac file system parsed off the image, then every photograph rendered | Puts an array back together from the images, and reads nearly every file system |
What the bench did with it.
What could honestly be promised, and when
Nothing was promised before the damage had been looked at. The drive went onto a current-monitored supply with its draw watched, and the damage itself was examined under a stereo microscope, with running held to the minimum that examination needed. Only then could the two figures that matter be given: what the work would cost, and what it could reasonably be expected to reach. On a damaged drive, anybody naming the second before looking is guessing with your photographs.
Clean air, once the damage was understood
Where the mechanism itself is affected there is one place to open a drive, which is clean air under laminar flow, and that is where this one was opened. Heads and platters were examined in turn, matched donor parts fitted where they were needed, and the drive brought up under watch rather than left to find its own way. Platters decide jobs like this one, so they were the first thing looked at and the thing everything else waited on.
Photographs before anything else
The imaging pass was ordered rather than sequential. The areas where the photographs live were read first, while the mechanism was at its steadiest, and the rest of the volume came afterwards. On a repaired drive that ordering is the difference between having the wedding and having most of a file system.
What went home.
The photographs were rendered here in turn before anything was sent, and they went back on new media. He had been carrying this as his own fault since the day it happened, and that deserves a direct answer: what decided the job was the condition of the platters, and by stopping when he did he left them in the best state anybody could have.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Jobs that came to nothing.
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.