PCs & notebooks · case notes · ADR-2025-2876
Short Reads Passed. The Long One Never Finished.
He was halfway through saving his own material and the drive was working against him. The 4TB Seagate had become very slow to boot up
, and transferring files takes hours rather than minutes
; some copies never finished at all, because it will disconnect itself during transfer
, and it had frozen the computer into a restart. About 25%
was safely elsewhere. The remaining three quarters was the reason he stopped and asked.
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What failed, and why.
A quick check and a long read are not asking a disk the same question. A short test touches a handful of counters, holds them against limits set with room to spare, and hands back a pass, which a worn drive clears comfortably. A sustained read crosses the surface and keeps going, and a failing drive shows itself there: first as retries, which is what hours instead of minutes actually means, then as a refusal, then as a disconnection once the retries run past whatever the interface will wait for. Freezing the computer is the same event seen from the other end. None of it is a quirk. It is a disk failing while being asked to work, and every further copy spends what is left of it.
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 | Defect tables and read behaviour taken off the firmware, where none of this shows in an ordinary readout | Gets into the manufacturer's service area, where ordinary ATA commands cannot go |
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Imaged with retry limits set low, and the three quarters he did not have taken first | Heads mapped first, then one platter side to a pass, with every reset, every timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| R-Studio Technician | The file system rebuilt off the image, and what came out of it opened one file at a time | Puts an array back together from the images, and reads nearly every file system |
What the bench did with it.
Copying was the wrong tool
Pulling files off by hand had got him a quarter of the way and would not get him further. Every copy that gives up part way asks the same weak ground for the same sectors, over and over, on a drive with a limited number of reads left in it. The order was reversed here: profile the drive, then image it, and leave until last the material he already had a copy of. Nothing was asked twice that did not need asking twice.
The unsaved three quarters went first
Sweeping steadily in one direction treats the mechanics better than fetching files to order, and it leaves the difficult ground to a final pass. By the time that comes round, everything else is on the copy already, captured while the drive was still willing to cooperate. What he had saved himself was left to the very end, since a second copy of it costs nothing but time.
A file list is not proof of a file
Names in a directory listing say very little about what sits beneath them, so the image was worked through and the files opened rather than counted. Every address that refused was followed back through the file table afterwards, so the report can name anything affected instead of quoting a percentage. What came back was reconciled against the quarter he already had before anything went out.
What went home.
The three quarters he had not managed to save were read off the image, checked item by item, and went home alongside the part he had. The Seagate stayed here. It had been describing its own condition for some time, first by slowing and then by disconnecting, and the only thing anybody could have done differently was stop copying sooner.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
More PC and laptop jobs off the bench.
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.