Power path · board work · ADR-2025-3182
The Light Used to Come On. Now Nothing Does.
He said that for four years the Toshiba gave him a light when it was plugged in but after four years it quit working. What he stated concerning it quitting was no power being able to feed into the device
, and that the blue light that would illuminate
no longer lights up
. Nothing else had happened to it as far as he could tell, and there were no warnings. He did not want it repaired. He just wanted the data transferred to another drive, and then to get rid of the old Toshiba. There was a need to find where the failure existed first: in the supply, in the case or on the drive's own board.
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What failed, and why.
When you say a light doesn't come on and it has always worked until now, that is a message only about power. That means either there is no power available or it cannot make it through, and there are three possible points at which it can stop: the lead and plug (which are outside), the small bridge circuit board located within the case, or the drive's own electronics. In any event they all lie ahead of the recording surfaces, which is why jobs like this one so frequently come back whole. A problem related to power does not affect the recording surfaces. It merely prevents anything from making it to those surfaces. Which of the three options applies decides the work, and nothing else does. If it is either the lead or the circuit board in the case, the disk may be accessed directly and that is virtually all of the job. However, if it is the circuit board in the drive itself, that is essentially component level work on that board. Identifying which option applies costs nothing, and it is done before a quote is provided.
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 | Disk brought to native access, past the enclosure completely | This allows access to the manufacturer's service area (where normal ATA commands cannot go) |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Data read on a supply that monitors current draw, with the draw watched from the first second | Instead of working around the drive's firmware and controller, it works with the two natively |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Filenames, folder names and dates read right out of the copy, then opened one by one | When other applications will not open it, this application will open APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs. |
What the bench did with it.
Follow the power, one stage at a time
The case, lead and bridge board were checked using magnified views and powered using a current-monitored supply, and each stage was asked "does anything pass through you?" It's a very slow method, but it is cost effective because once you reach a point where nothing passes through, you stop checking. Guesswork at this fault can result in replacing good components and still ending up with a dark drive after replacement.
Reach the disk without the case
After being removed from the enclosure and mounted on bench hardware, the disk responded, which separated two faults that appear identical when viewed externally. One is a drive that will not operate due to failure of its own board. The second is a drive that was never provided power; both present themselves to an owner as a dark box. Only one requires repair to the drive. Here the disk was operational, and had simply sat behind a fault in the supply.
Copy first, and read from the copy
Following receipt of a reliable supply of power, the drive functioned like a normal drive; i.e., the defect tables responded immediately and the image maintained a constant read speed from one end of the media to the other. The reading of the media afterwards took place from a copy of the media instead of the original, and every item contained within the media was individually opened and inspected rather than listed. This is typical behaviour for an electrical job. The damage is confined to the electronic area.
What went home.
All items contained within the media were successfully copied onto his requested new drive, inspected item by item first, and he did not want his original enclosure back. Pricing was our published price for a single drive unit: £300 + VAT. He received our quotation in writing prior to us touching any component. The failure was caused by failure to deliver sufficient power to be able to access the data. The medium containing the data was never reached by that failure.
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.