External drives · worn heads · NTG-2025-2274
It Scanned Till Breakfast, and by Then It Was Grinding.
Everything I have ever played out, plus the mixes I made myself
— twenty years of it, on one Expansion, carried between holiday parks around Skegness. Then Disk Management started describing the volume as unallocated
and offering a button to initialise it. He turned that down, went looking on a forum, and left DMDE running on my way to bed
. At breakfast the log was nothing but errors, screen after screen
, and underneath it a noise no drive of his had made in twenty years: a grinding I could hear two rooms away
. His message ended: it ran the whole night through, which I now know was hours too many
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
The damage starts with one word: unallocated. People read it and reach for a scanner, and that is the point at which a bad position gets worse. A disk can fail to read its own partition table for several reasons, and one of the likeliest is a set of tired heads; by the time it cannot, it has usually stopped returning anything dependable. Set a full-surface scan on hardware in that state and those heads are walked over every sector, hour upon hour, with no rest built into the process anywhere. Few of them last the course. Here the weakest of the four gave out overnight: whatever thin film of air normally holds a slider off the surface stopped doing so, and metal met coating. Two rooms away, that is what he could hear. Each sweep after it lifted more coating and returned less.
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 | Graded all four surfaces and ruled the bands the scan had ruined out of bounds | 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 | Long unbroken sweeps, with the healthy ground copied ahead of everything else | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Opened the volume and put every track back into the folder he had filed it under | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
Draw the map before quoting a figure
The stack under the cover was scrap. Scoring showed on both platters, light across most of the disk and deep where the scan had spent longest. The hour at which he switched it off is what rescued this job. Had it run a second night rather than stopping at breakfast, there would be nothing on this page.
New heads, then a survey, and a price after that
With a donor stack of the correct model fitted, the drive read again, and mapping came next: which zones still held, and which did not. Where the disk was sound it gave up data at a good rate. Over the scored bands the readings dropped away to nothing. He got no price until we could point at that map.
Clean ground in one pass, scored bands afterwards
Sweeps were kept long, with the actuator asked to travel as little as it could, because a head dragged over scored ground picks up loose particles and carries them into sound territory. The good regions therefore went first, in one uninterrupted pass, written straight to new media. Afterwards, in short slow sittings, the banded stretches gave up what little they had.
What was returned.
Almost all of the library is back, arranged the way he arranged it over twenty years. What is missing lies inside the scored bands, and the report names it item by item: a run of commercial releases he can buy for a second time, and four recordings of his own that he cannot. He was told it in those terms, with nothing dressed up.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More jobs off desktop disks.
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.