Pocket hard drives · job notes · NTG-2025-2288
Every Client's Books Were on It. No Machine Could See It.
There was no announcement. Three years of daily use in an Ilkeston bookkeeping practice — not a moment's bother out of it, ever
— and then, as she puts it, I shut it down at teatime on Monday, and come Tuesday there was nothing there
. The light came on as usual. Held in the hand, the case was humming away just as it always did
. Disk Management showed nothing at all, though — not on one port, not on one machine anywhere in the office. Before she rang, there had been three restarts and a second cable. On the contents she was blunt: that drive has every client's books on it
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Two things pointed at the bridge board long before the parcel arrived: power was reaching the disk, the platters were turning, and still nothing in that office could see it. Ordinarily a failing disk gives some notice of itself. It slows down, it makes a noise nobody recognises, it disappears and returns over a fortnight or so, and then it is gone. This one behaved like any other Monday, and on the Tuesday nobody could find it. Rule the mechanism out and what remains is whatever stands between the platters and the USB port, which in a pocket-sized case means a single part. Meanwhile two VAT returns and a year-end all fell inside one fortnight. Answered one way, she has an awkward week; answered the other, a practice has nothing at all to file. It went to the front of the bench queue.
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 | Ran the disk directly on SATA: healthy motor, firmware answering, so the bridge was the culprit | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Kept the key-bearing USB board wired in throughout, which left nothing to unlock at the end | Reads through the enclosure's own USB board at full speed, rather than round it |
| R-Studio Technician | Client folders came out of the image one by one, following her list of filing dates | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
Opened that same day, since the filing dates were not going to wait
Within the hour the disk was out of its case and on bench hardware, where it answered everything asked of it straight. Spin speed held, firmware replied promptly, each head came back clean. With the mechanism cleared and a single candidate left standing, the copy was running before lunch.
Discard that board and you have discarded the data
A My Passport keeps its key in the USB electronics, and in no other place, which is why a donor board hands you back a disk you cannot read. This one had failed only by half. The USB side was finished; everything else came up quite happily on clean bench power, and it stayed wired in place until the copy had finished. Off the image, the volume opened just as it had always opened.
Checked in the order her dates demanded
The dates came over by email and the checking followed them exactly. Whichever VAT set was due soonest was opened ledger by ledger and sent back first, and the remainder was verified afterwards. A deadline takes no interest at all in the rest of a disk. It cares about the right folders turning up on the right morning.
What was returned.
Not one ledger came up short, and both returns went in ahead of their filing dates. One habit has changed since: every evening, before she shuts up, a second drive copies the client files.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More portable-drive jobs on the log.
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.