Portable drives · head fault · ADR-2025-3185
He Had Read His Own Drive Correctly.
The description over the telephone was better than most. A Toshiba 2TB, a year or two old, had started making clicking noises
, and neither the PC nor the Xbox would read it any more. He had not stopped there. The LED lights up
, he said, and he could hear/feel the spindle turning
— but with a hand flat on the case he could also feel the head rapidly clicking back and forth, as if it cant read
. Then the figure that mattered: 1.9TB on it, and on nothing else.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
Two systems have to work together, and only one of them still was. The motor was bringing the platters up to speed, which is exactly what he could feel through the casing. The heads were the part that had given out. They sweep, they fail to find the servo pattern that tells them where above the surface they are, they reset, and they go round again. No computer ever sees a drive in that state, because the drive never gets far enough to say what it is — which is why an Xbox and a PC returned the same answer. It also explains why switching it on again is the one thing to avoid. Every sweep carries failing heads over the very surfaces 1.9TB is written on.
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 one surface at a time once the replacement heads were in and aligned | Heads mapped first, then one platter side to a pass, with every reset, every timeout and the power itself kept under our own control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Set the reading order: forward passes first, reluctant ground held back to the end | Works with the drive's firmware and controller directly rather than around them |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Brought the drive up past its USB bridge and confirmed it identified after the change | Gets into the manufacturer's service area, where ordinary ATA commands cannot go |
What the bench did with it.
The magnifier settles it, not the ear
His reading of it held up under magnification. The heads had gone; the surfaces beneath them had not. There was no scoring along the tracks the sliders had been sweeping, which on a drive of a year or two is what you hope for and never assume. Nothing else in the mechanism was out of order either. The spindle ran true and quiet, and the whole of the fault sat in the stack above it.
A matched head set, and the alignment with it
Nobody repairs a head and nobody straightens one. Flying height is set in nanometres during manufacture, so the only route open is a set from a matching family and firmware generation, fitted under laminar flow with its alignment set on the bench rather than left to luck. Ours went in, power went back on, and the drive completed its start-up, gave its own model string and held there. Only after that was a single sector read off it.
One run, and the sound ground read first
Imaging started the moment the drive was reading and carried on until the copy was whole, because a repaired mechanism is at its best on its first run and never better afterwards. Sound ground went across at full rate. Whatever pushed back was noted, stepped over, and given short passes right at the end.
What went home.
The finished image was complete, and everything after that happened against the copy rather than the drive. Folders arrived back under their own names, and files were opened and looked at here before any of it travelled. What went home was the 1.9TB he had been counting on, written to fresh media. The Toshiba stayed with us rather than going back into service: a mechanism carrying somebody else's heads is a step in a recovery, not a drive to keep using. The charge followed the published single-drive band, £300 + VAT, quoted to him in writing while the drive was still unopened.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Further portable-drive jobs, written up.
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.