Case notes · PCs & notebooks · NTG-2025-1476
Two Verdicts From One Disk. Believe the Scan.
Two answers came out of Lenovo's own diagnostics and they contradict one another flatly: it passes the health check, then the long test stops part way through, and it does that every time
. Behind the question was a sale. The IdeaPad had a buyer waiting and needed wiping before handover, and the electrician who owned it had drawn the obvious conclusion — the machine works, so the disk must be the trouble
. Three folders were all he wanted off it.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
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What went wrong, and why.
A disk running SMART is marking its own homework. There are a handful of counters, they are held against limits the maker set with room to spare, and that is how a worn-out drive still hands you back the word pass. An extended test works differently. It walks the whole surface, and it stops at the first block that will not read. Neither answer is untrue, and what tells you something is the distance between the two. Believe the test that actually put a head across the platters. Most disks say nothing at all in advance. This one had been signalling for months.
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 | None of it appears in a SMART readout, so the maker's own logs and defect tables were pulled first | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | The image was taken in two runs: whatever came readily, and then the band that did not | 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 |
| R-Studio Technician | Three folders came off that image, and every file inside them was opened individually | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
Look underneath the verdict
Below the pass, the numbers looked a great deal worse. Across the best part of a year, reallocated sectors had gone up every month; further addresses were pending and unresolved; one band on the platter replied noticeably slower than the tracks around it. Not one of those figures had crossed a threshold, and so the drive kept awarding itself a pass. That is precisely the gap in which a great many disks fail.
Three folders were wanted; the whole disk was copied
Those folders were spread across every surface in the unit, and fetching them to order would have had the heads skipping around a platter set already on its way out. Sweeping steadily from one end to the other treats the mechanics far better, and it puts the awkward band into a closing pass. By the time that comes round, the rest is on the copy already, taken during the window in which the drive still cooperated.
A file list is not proof it opens
The finished image gave up job photographs, the accounts spreadsheets, and correspondence going back years — none of it accepted on trust. Every file was opened, because a name in a directory listing says almost nothing about what sits beneath it. Any address that would not read was traced back through the file table afterwards, and none of them fell inside the three folders he wanted.
What was returned.
Worksop got its three folders back, checked one file at a time, and we hold a full image of the rest. The IdeaPad went to its buyer with an SSD in it and the old disk stayed behind. Its decline had been running well ahead of anything its own self-assessment was willing to admit.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More PC and laptop work from the bench.
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.