Board-level faults · mains damage · NTG-2025-1764
I Unscrewed It to See Whether the Heads Were Stuck.
He owned up to it in the first email, before the parcel was taped. A signwriter in Chesterfield, he photographs the town's shopfront lettering for a residents' newsletter he edits, and the whole run of it sat on the WD Blue under his desk. The power on his street had gone twice inside ten minutes one evening, and from then on the drive did one thing: a tick every second, and not another sound out of it
. Somewhere he had read that a ticking drive means stuck heads, so it was open on the worktop before ten that night
. Nothing under there looked wrong to him, which left the board or the motor, and I could not tell you which
. It was not the fault that worried us. It was the open cover.
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What went wrong, and why.
Four screws come out in a minute, and the unscrewing is not the part that costs money. The cost is that the drive has to run afterwards. That steel top is not a lid on a modern disk; it is a component of the seal, and beneath it the heads ride two or three nanometres clear of platters spinning fast, with less room than any particle floating about a kitchen. Nothing looks any different that night. The invoice for it turns up later. Whatever the electricity ruined is still ruined, and there is now household dust across the surfaces his photographs are written to.
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 | Read it as an electronics fault rather than a mechanical one, and named the part that had gone | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaged at a low rate, taking it as given that kitchen air had already been over the surfaces | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the file system, then opened every photograph on it | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
Clean the platters before anything turns
What he did next is what saved this job: nothing was plugged back in, the screws went back, the drive went into a bag. Magnified, the top platter carried a fair load of grit, and fibres off a jumper, and fibres off a tea towel, none of it anything a breather filter would ever have let past. Every bit of it was lifted before power went near the spindle. A particle still sitting there becomes a cutting tool as soon as a head sweeps past.
Then find out what the electricity had taken
Cleaning had to come first, because a dirty surface will not report anything you can trust. Heads, motor and platters then tested sound, which left the board, and on the board a single component: the motor driver, finished off by whatever the mains put through it. Retry once a second is what a drive does when it cannot reach speed, and a metal case makes that hard to tell apart from a head fault. He had guessed reasonably. The drive had been describing itself badly.
Donor board on, then a gentle image
The replacement board matched on revision, with the ROM off the damaged one moved across; leave that chip behind and the replacement cannot tell one WD Blue from another. No procedure reverses the kitchen air that had already been over those platters, so the image was taken slowly, with retries held down. It reached the end regardless.
What was returned.
Every frame came back: three winters of Chesterfield shopfronts, and the people standing in the doorways, shot for the newsletter he edits. How near that came to ending the other way was not something we went into at the time. Two drives hold it now, and the Torx set has stayed in the drawer.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Other jobs that started with the power.
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.