Missing or corrupt files · lab log · NTG-2025-2263
It Went to the Floor and Still Sounds Right.
A shelf bracket over a desk in Loughborough gave way halfway through a backup, and the My Book beneath it hit the floor with both leads plugged in. A laboratory technician's whole family video collection was on it, camcorder tapes transferred across years. Afterwards nothing about the drive seemed wrong at all: it powers up exactly the way it always did
, no odd sounds at all
, and Windows will still cheerfully offer to Safely Remove Hardware
. A drive letter is the thing that never arrives.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Before a drive letter turns up, four things have to work in sequence: heads and motor first; then the little board that bridges USB and SATA; then the partition map; last of all, the filesystem. Up to speed, announcing itself: numbers one and two were fine. Which left the third. That is exactly what a write cut off part way leaves behind: good mechanics carrying damaged records. Enclosures like this add a rule of their own. Decryption happens on that small board, so it comes to the bench with its disk and does not leave it. Split them up and every sector you copy is meaningless.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Heads, motor and platters cleared before a scrap of logical work | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Imaged through the unit's own bridge, so that decryption was left alone | Reads through the enclosure's own USB board at full speed, rather than round it |
| R-Studio Technician | Mended the NTFS structures and the partition map, all on the image | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
Prove the mechanics before you believe anything
Sounding right is not evidence of anything. Start-up current, per-head read rates, both defect tables, the reallocation counters — all measured, all sitting where they ought to sit. Twenty minutes with the meters took a worrying job and made it an ordinary one.
Image it with that board left in place
The key on a My Book lives in that small USB board, so imaging went through it, with the board sitting between disk and imager, and from sector zero the copy came off cleanly. Pull the bare disk and hang it off a SATA port, and the result is a flawless copy of something nobody can use: every byte accounted for, and not one of them meaning anything.
Mend the image; leave the original alone
Viewed from the copy, the damage was recent and very small: one partition entry left half written in the instant the unit left the shelf. Repairs were carried out on the image. The original had nothing written back to it at any point, and the volume mounted first time, folders and timestamps where they should be.
What was returned.
Nothing at all was absent. Counted against the image, each folder held exactly what it said it held. From first measurement to last, disk and bridge were handled as a single object, and with hardware built this way that is most of the job.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Other jobs about missing files and unreadable volumes.
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.