Portable drives · bench record · NTG-2025-1458
After the Fall, One Tick Every Few Seconds.
Two summers of wedding RAW had come down to a single copy. Months earlier the finished JPEGs went out to the couples and then came off the laptop to free up room, leaving one portable drive as the only place any of the originals still existed. In a Newark-on-Trent yard a bag tipped over and that drive met concrete. Its behaviour since: about six ticks, then it goes quiet
. The one other sign of anything happening is a blue light and nothing whatsoever else
. On the platters, in his words, are the raw frames off two full wedding summers
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
A head knows its position only because the factory wrote servo marks onto every platter, and the arm steers by reading them. Push the stack out of position and those marks arrive as noise instead of as a location. So the arm travels across the surface, recognises none of it, pulls back onto its ramp and sets off once more; that cycle, on repeat, is the noise he could hear across the room. As evidence the blue light is worthless: powering the USB board lights it, whatever the machinery behind may or may not be doing. One further go produced an identical performance, and he stopped there. That is the only reason this archive survived.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Ranked the heads before anything else, so the weakest surface came last | One platter side per pass, with the heads mapped before a single sector is taken off, and the resets, the timeouts and the power all held under our control |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | New stack in, then imaged zone by zone, firmware area taken first | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the exFAT volume off the copy, then opened each CR3 one at a time | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
Rubber off, USB board unplugged, a plain SATA mechanism
Peel the rubber back, unplug the small USB board, and nothing exotic is left underneath: a 2.5in SATA mechanism of a type that has shipped in millions. Concrete is the only unusual entry in its history. Bench power then means the platters turn when the lab says so, and not because some operating system elsewhere has gone hunting for a volume.
A donor stack, and a head-by-head survey before any copying
Family and firmware revision both had to agree, and a donor on our own shelf did. Once its stack was in, the drive announced itself once more, though it would still part with nothing. Next came the survey — every head run against the clock and marked for how cleanly it pulled — so that this particular disk, and not a house recipe, dictated the imaging order. One head stayed steady from beginning to end. The second dragged, faltered repeatedly, and its platter surface went last.
Best head leading, the unreliable one held back
Work started on the good side. Timeouts stayed short, and each refusal was answered with a power cycle. By the point anything at all was asked of the weaker head, most of the archive had already come off, and its platter was then read at whatever rate it felt inclined to offer. Bench to sign-off took six days. On a drive that has been on concrete, patience is not politeness; it is the difference between finishing and not finishing.
What was returned.
Nothing left here until every CR3 had been opened and drawn on screen. To a photographer, a folder full of filenames settles nothing if the pictures will not render. New media carried the archive home. Before the day was out a duplicate had gone onto a second drive, so what used to exist once now exists twice.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More portable-drive jobs on the log.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.