Portable drives · job notes · NTG-2025-1785
The Shop Up the Road Had Got It Right.
A day before the parcel arrived, the telephone call did. What had happened in a Skegness office was that a chair arm caught the cable while a copy was running, and the Seagate came off the desk. The person who looks after the site laptops had it open, shut it again, and did not dress up the answer: the ticking is coming from the head stack, not from the motor
, followed by this wants a lab, and we are not one
. Secondhand off an online advert is where the drive had come from, and what was on it he described as my whole working life, every driveway and every patio
.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
They had told him the truth; the truth simply runs out at the door of a clean-air bench. Nanometres are the units flying height is set in, and it is set during manufacture, which means nobody anywhere straightens an arm and puts it back. The choice is a stack from the same production run or no job at all, and that can be explained over the telephone. The discs are the part that cannot. A slider coming down onto the coating during a fall leaves marking, and marking has to be worked around instead of read through — but whether it happened at all is unknown until somebody lifts the lid. Hence a free look, and a figure that follows it in writing.
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 | Each donor head graded against its neighbours as soon as data started arriving | 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 | Sequenced the job to leave the marked band until the clean areas were done | Reads through the drive's own firmware and controller instead of working round them |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Read out the firmware's service log, which is where a used drive's history hides | Reaches the maker's own service mode, which standard ATA commands cannot |
What happened on the bench.
Look at the discs before any promise is made
Their diagnosis held up under magnification. One arm rode higher than the rest, and no stack in that state will track anything. That left the platters. Earlier in this drive's life a slider had come down and put a pale ring on the second surface: light marking, and not the deep scoring that would end a job on the spot. From the service log came the rest of the story — sectors had been quietly retiring long before the unit was ever sold on.
A donor stack, in a space with nothing to spare
Slim Seagate portables leave next to no room inside, and mechanisms that tight will take only a narrow band of donors: the family has to match and so does the firmware generation, while the label on the outside gets you part of the way and no further. Ours was already on the shelf. In it went beneath laminar flow; the disc came up and held; and the grading of every head individually happened before any bulk copying.
Clean areas first; the ring last of all
The clean areas were copied straight through, end to end, in one run, taken while the fitted stack was new. Only then did the marked band get its turn, and gently: short passes, hardly any retries, a rest between each. A reasonable proportion of what it held came back before it stopped yielding altogether, and we stopped there too.
What was returned.
Onto fresh media went the greater part of it — site photographs going back years, sorted and refiled under the address of the job they belong to. The report is no less plain about what stayed behind. Under the marked ring lay a single folder from his first summer of trading, and it stayed there; a warranty argument with a customer is what those pictures were wanted for. Given a used disk taken off a desk mid-copy, with no copy held anywhere else, that is still a decent result. Pricing followed the published band for one drive, £300 + VAT, handed over in writing before anything chargeable started.
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.