Portable drives · job record · NTG-2025-1775
The Boot Screen Finds It. Windows Freezes.
One external drive in Ilkeston carried nine years of an independent garage's paperwork: scanned receipts, VAT workings, invoice runs. The accountant had spent most of a year asking for year-end figures out of it. The boot screen picks it up every time, no bother
, said the owner — but reach Windows and the whole machine freezes till I pull the plug out
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
Neither one is lying; they are answering different questions. What a BIOS needs is an introduction — model, capacity, a parameter or two — and a drive that still turns and can still speak to its own controller will manage an introduction. Windows wants the contents next: a partition table first, filesystem records after that, and then sector upon sector, each owed back before a deadline of a fraction of a second. Miss that and the drive comes off the bus. Failing there means failing at the only task the thing exists for, and the reasons narrow to two. Either firmware quits the instant user data is requested, or the media has worn to the point where reads keep taking longer than they are permitted.
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 | Answered the one question that shapes everything after it: firmware, or media | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaged with the deadlines taken off and nothing timing it | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the NTFS volume once there was a complete image | Rebuilds an array off the images, and reads almost any file system |
What happened on the bench.
Answer that question before the disk turns again
Firmware was fine. Ask for the service area and back it came, module by module, all present and readable. It was the media underneath that had gone. Sectors did return, singly, several seconds between them — which is the symptom entire, since Windows grants a fraction of a second and then no further time whatsoever.
Copy it with the clock taken off
Waiting is something Windows will not do for a slow disk and something a bench imager does for a living; most of the gap between the two lies in that alone. Off came the deadlines. Hesitations were resolved by one measured reset instead of a flurry of retries, and the rate was left free to drop to whatever the worn regions could sustain. The run took several days. What it produced was the whole disk, as one complete image.
After that, only the copy gets touched
The partition table and the NTFS records were lifted from the image; with the volume reassembled, twelve unreachable months ended at the first try — ledgers, invoice runs, scanned receipts.
What was returned.
To the last, one worn band held on to what it carried, and a few scanned receipts were inside it. That is the extent of what stayed behind. Every invoice came back and every VAT workbook came back. The nine years travelled home to Ilkeston on new media, at the single-drive band this business publishes: £300 + VAT, agreed in writing beforehand.
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.