The fault · a drive making a noise it never made before
Take the power off it, wherever in Nottingham it sits, and then do nothing else. At the moment the noise begins, what is written on the platters is generally still all there; what disappears afterwards disappears into the retries. A head that cannot find its bearings goes back to the ramp, sets out across the surface, finds nothing, returns and sets out once more — round and round for as long as the plug stays in, each pass another opportunity to touch the platter. Pull it out and the count stops where it stands. £300 + VAT covers a single drive, the assessment ahead of that is free, you get the figure in writing before any of it starts, and nothing to pay on most jobs where nothing comes back.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
| What it looks like | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| A steady tick, about one a second, going on and on | Steering depends on servo marks written in at the factory. With none of them readable, the arm parks itself on the ramp and begins the search once more | Cut the power to it |
| A thin beeping, most often from a 2.5" portable | Nothing turning and no noise but that: a seized spindle bearing, or heads stuck fast to the platter surface | No tapping it, no shaking it |
| A scraping, grinding kind of noise | A head is resting on the platter, damaging the surface for every second the disk turns | Files go while it keeps turning |
| One brief chirp on every power-up | The heads cannot calibrate, usually after a drop | Turn it off and stop there |
| Two or three clicks, then quiet | It abandons the attempt, resets itself, then repeats the identical sequence | Take the plug out to end the cycle |
| The clicking starts on particular files | One head has gone, or a single band of platter is damaged | Stop the copy; it needs imaging |
Your device picks up a case number the day it arrives, and an engineer then establishes what has genuinely gone wrong — at no cost, and ahead of everything else. Two things come back to you together: a plain account of what can be lifted and what cannot, and one fixed figure in writing. Agree to that figure, or turn it down and pay nothing.
Mechanism and platter surfaces are inspected first, with nothing connected. Where a noisy unit genuinely has to run, an engineer stays with it and allows it seconds at a time. It is never left turning on its own.
The dead head stack is removed and a donor set matched to your model goes in its place. A locked spindle is freed off. Heads resting on a platter are lifted away without being dragged over anything. Only when all that is finished is the drive asked to do one job: produce a full image, and nothing besides.
A hardware imager works gently. Awkward regions are skipped for now, the easy sectors are banked, and it returns for the difficult ground afterwards until the copy holds as much as the disk will give up. Every later step runs against that copy, and your drive is never written to.
The file list reaches you before any invoice does. Say yes and it is billed; say no and it is not — and on most jobs, if nothing comes back there is nothing to pay. Whatever comes off goes home on media bought in for your case, carriage at our end. Nothing here is closed until you have opened those files on your own machine.
One word covers this whole page: stop. Clearance between a head and a platter doing thousands of revolutions a minute is measured in nanometres, and engineering at that tolerance does not repair itself. On the noisy drives arriving here, the gap between a full recovery and a partial one is usually just how fast somebody reached the plug. Post it and an engineer has the lid off the day it lands; one figure follows in writing, before there is anything to pay for.
Five years of takings sat on a drive that arrived from an Ilkeston upholstery workshop, ticking away at roughly one beat a second. The second donor stack held. Imaging was given as long as it asked for, and the books opened once more, with that quarter's VAT return still outstanding.
Very probably not. Ticking is the head assembly failing to locate itself, and it says nothing whatever about the platters underneath, which is where your files physically sit. A matched donor stack and a slow, unhurried image normally bring back the bulk of a disk. The damage comes from every extra minute the thing spends running once the noise has started.
None at all, and it makes matters worse. That advice is older than any drive still in service. Chill a sealed assembly and two separate things go wrong at once: the metals contract at different rates, and water condenses where none belongs. Warm it back up and there are corroded contacts on top of the original fault — two problems on the bench where there was one.
Servo marks go down on every platter at the factory, and the arm hunts for them. Finding nothing, it withdraws to the ramp and sets off again; that repeating cycle is the sound. What the noise will not tell you is the reason — a misaligned head, a preamplifier giving up, contact marks across a surface — because through an alloy case those three sound identical. Telling them apart means the lid off, under a bench.
No. Every request the software makes still has to pass through the head assembly that has already failed, so all it achieves is keeping the drive doing the one thing that is wearing it out.
The look costs nothing. What comes back to you is a file list — what opened, what did not — plus one figure to finish the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. Most jobs carry no fee at all unless the data comes back. Leave the drive switched off until you have that list.