The fault · a click, a beep or a grind from the drive
Take the power off before reading the next sentence. Generally, a drive that starts to click or beep is still holding what it had an hour previously; whatever is lost after that is lost when subsequent attempts are made. The head cannot find out where it is, so it retreats to the ramp, sweeps out again, finds nothing, and resets. This continues around and around while power is applied to the drive; with each sweep it is just one more opportunity for contact with the disk. Remove the plug and the damage will stop at whatever point it has reached. One drive costs £300 + VAT; the look that comes first is free, one written figure is sent to you prior to any of the work commencing, and on most jobs you only pay if we recover your data.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
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| How it shows itself | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A steady clicking, approximately one per second, that persists | Position is determined using servo data embedded into the drive during manufacturing. Without this data available, the actuator will attempt to locate its position again, resetting to the ramp, and sweeping out once more. | Cut it off at the wall socket. |
| Low-level beeping, typically from a small 2.5" portable | Nothing is spinning and there are no other sounds coming from it: a spindle bearing gone completely solid, or the heads stuck to their respective platters. | Tapping it won't get you anything. |
| Dry rasping or grinding noise | A head is lying on a platter, scraping off the thin layer of coating on each revolution. | Data goes with each turn |
| A brief chirp upon each start-up. | The heads will not calibrate properly; this usually occurs after some type of physical shock. | Shut it off now. Leave it alone. |
| Two or three clicks and then nothing more. | It quits trying, resets back to the beginning, and repeats the entire process again. | Pulling the plug will stop this repeating loop. |
| The clicking noise begins on specific files. | Either one head has failed, or a band of coating has been damaged on a portion of the platter. | Stop making copies. It needs an image instead. |
As soon as your parcel arrives here, an engineer assigns a case number that same day, prior to determining what has really failed, which is the first thing done and costs you nothing. In addition to a note of what can and cannot be recovered from your drive, you will receive at the same time the fixed, written price for restoring what can be recovered. You can accept this quote, or decline it, which will result in no further obligation on your part and nothing owed to us.
Examination of both heads and platter surfaces occurs first, with nothing connected to the drive at all. If examination reveals that a noisy unit actually requires operation, it is done manually. Manual operation entails running the device for only a second or two at a time with someone monitoring its operation. None of the devices arriving here are allowed to continue operating beyond the manual operation described above.
A donor head assembly, identical in specifications to your original failed head assembly, replaces the failed one. Any bearings that have gone solid are freed mechanically. Heads that are resting on a platter are carefully lifted away from said platter without being dragged anywhere. After completion of the aforementioned operations, and only then, your drive may be operated, for a single task: taking a full image of your disk contents, with no additional demands placed upon your drive.
A hardware imager reads the drive gently, in passes, so difficult portions of the disk may remain unread until after all portions of easier-to-read areas have been successfully transferred, and then the imager returns for the rest. Once the copy has been filled as far as the disk allows, each subsequent operation must be performed using the copy, as opposed to reading directly from the original. Thus, your drive is only ever read from, and no write operations occur to it.
You will see what has been recovered as a list first, after which a bill exists. Accepting the list means that a bill will be issued. Rejecting the list means that a bill will not be issued, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. The recovered data travels from here back to you via new media purchased specifically for your project, with the cost of postage paid by us. Your case is not resolved (i.e., "closed") until you personally view the files on a computer of your own.
This page comes down to one word: stop. A head rides over a platter that is turning thousands of times a minute, at a clearance that is measured in nanometres, and engineering that is held to that kind of tolerance does not put itself right again. With noisy drives, whether a recovery ends up complete or only partial usually comes down to how quickly somebody got to the plug. Get a quote first, by phone or with the form, then post it or drop it off at our Guildford intake lab, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed), and an engineer opens it on the day it arrives; a written figure follows after that, and nothing is chargeable until you accept it.
Five years of takings were on the drive this Ealing-based upholstery company sent in, and it was knocking away at about one beat a second. The second donor stack was the one that worked. All imaging was allowed whatever time it required. And the books were open once again with that quarter's VAT return still to file.
Yes, most probably. A "click" is a failure of the head assembly to locate itself. But that tells you nothing about the platters underneath that are actually holding your data. Most of a disk usually returns with a matched donor stack and an unhurried image. What costs you is the time the disk runs after the noise starts.
No, you add another fault to the one you already had. The tip is older than any drive that is currently in service. Place a sealed head assembly in the cold and two independent events occur: metals of differing types shrink by different amounts, and water begins to form in areas where it should not exist. Let it warm up again and you'll find oxidation covering the contacts. So the workbench is seeing two faults instead of just one.
Each platter leaves the manufacturing plant covered with servo markings across its face. The arm searches for these markings. If none respond, it retreats to the ramp and repeats the process from beginning to end, and it is this repeated process that you're hearing. The one piece of information that the noise will never provide you with is why. A head assembly that is out of alignment, a preamp that has stopped working, or contact marks on one of the surfaces cannot be distinguished from each other behind an aluminium housing. In order to distinguish them, the housing must be removed.
Not via software. No matter what the software asks for, it will still be provided by a head assembly that has already failed; thus, the only outcome of trying to do anything with it will be a drive that keeps doing the very thing that is wearing it out.
It doesn't cost you anything for us to look at it. All we do is give you a breakdown of what opened and what did not, plus a single fixed price to complete, written down before you agree to let us continue. On most jobs, you only pay if we recover your data. Please don't turn on the drive until you get that breakdown.