Damaged connectors · bench record · NTG-2025-1768
It Left the Desk With the Copy Still Running.
A building surveyor in Beeston was moving nearly two years of condition-survey photography off a tired laptop when her foot caught the lead. The Canvio, she says, went off the desk while it was still copying
, and the socket went with it — the lead took the socket clean off the drive
. What it does now is grunt the once, then stop
, and nothing in the office can find it
. On the timing, she was right to be worried.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
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What went wrong, and why.
Whether the platters were turning as it went is the question that settles a job like this one. Sitting idle, a drive keeps its heads on a ramp, off the platter entirely and well away from any recorded surface, and a fall from desk height in that condition frequently does no damage whatever. Mid-copy is another matter entirely. There is no ramp involved: the sliders are out over live tracks, the arm is moving, and the whole thing is finished before firmware gets any opportunity to retract them. From the far side of a room two falls look identical, and they can bill in quite different ways. This one was the expensive sort.
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 head by head first, which set the order the surfaces were then imaged in | 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 | Carried the copy, resetting the drive on the bench each time it hung rather than letting Windows do it | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the volume off the image and took the half-written folder out of it whole | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
Look at the platters before anything is allowed to turn
A fall does not distribute its damage evenly, and in clean air this stack illustrated the point neatly. Two sliders had visibly taken it; the others looked as they should. Where the arm had been pushed round, a narrow band of scuffing followed the arc. Shallow, but real. It was not the deep circular scoring that settles a job as soon as a lid comes off.
Donor stack in, surfaces surveyed, running order set
The survey dictates running order, and no survey happens until a drive will read something, so a matched donor stack was fitted before anything else. New heads on, the clean zones came off fast, at the point when those heads were freshest. The scuffing was held back until last and then crossed slowly, with resets to hand and the power switch beside them.
The scuffing had happened long before the parcel arrived
That band holds whatever sat under the sliders at the instant it hit the floor, so the band went to the end of the job and was worked slowly with the retry allowance cut back to almost nothing. Most of it came off. Windows was never allowed near the drive: one request per sector from the imager, and never a second.
What was returned.
Nearly all of it came home. What did not is a short run of elevation photographs inside the scuffed strip, every one of them named by filename in the report. The folder that was half written when her foot caught the lead came out of the image intact, a few hours after the Canvio was boxed up to go back.
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.