The fault · a knock, or a drop onto the floor
Keep it unplugged, wherever in Nottingham it fell. Everything that follows turns on one question: were the platters going round as it landed? Powered down, a fall does far less to a hard disk than people imagine, with the heads parked away to one side and the chassis absorbing the fall. Turning, there is no margin whatever — thousands of revolutions a minute under a head flying nanometres clear, and nowhere for it to go. So the urge to plug it in and see is the one worth resisting: after a fall, the first spin-up is frequently the last clean pass a disk has in it, and testing spends that pass. One drive is £300 + VAT, the assessment ahead of it costs nothing, and there is no charge on most jobs where the data cannot be read back.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
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| What it looks like | What usually causes it | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Clicking started with the fall | The knock pushed the heads out of alignment, and back they go to try again | Keep the power off it |
| A single beep, then nothing | Nothing turns at all: a locked bearing, or heads lying flat against the platter | Shaking will not free it |
| No machine will find it now | Heads resting on the surface, a spindle that will not start turning, or damage to the board or the socket | Send it in instead of retrying |
| Worked at first, going downhill now | Light damage, deepening with every hour it runs | Act while it still responds |
| An SSD or a stick that stopped when it landed | There is nothing moving in one of those, so it will be the board, a joint or a connector | Board-level repair, not mechanics |
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.
An engineer works over the drive by hand before anything is connected. A head pushed off alignment can settle onto the surface within one turn of the platter. If a drive genuinely must run, it gets a single rotation, watched.
The damaged head stack is lifted out and replaced by a donor matched to your own drive. Seized spindles are freed, any head resting on a platter is raised clear, and boards and sockets are repaired.
Whatever reads cleanly is taken off first and banked somewhere safe. Only afterwards is any attempt made on the sectors the fall ruined.
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.
What the datasheets actually say: a 2.5" notebook mechanism tends to be rated near ~300G in use, rising to something like ~650G with the heads parked; certain 3.5" desktop units, meanwhile, carry figures as low as ~30G once the platters are up to speed. Powering a machine off before it is carried anywhere costs you nothing, and nothing else on this page pays as well.
It tipped over during the pack-down, and it was already clicking before it ever got to the bench. On it sat three years of paid work, including that morning's ceremony. Heads came off a matched donor, the copy ran across two days, and back came every gallery.
Most of them can, provided nobody has already had a go first. Making the mechanism serviceable again is not the aim — it has to survive one slow read and nothing more. A donor head stack matched by model and batch goes in, imaging is taken gently, and the greater part of the surface usually comes off.
More than anything else on this page. Drop the same drive with the power off and it is a far smaller problem. There is no room to give under a head that rides nanometres above a turning platter, and on its way it can score the coating. Leave the thing unplugged.
Not often. With no moving parts inside, the shock is taken by the board — a connector wrenched off, or a solder joint opened up. Both of those are bench electronics and both can be mended. Flash chips hold your files, and they normally come through it untouched.
Almost certainly. Nudge a bearing or a head slightly off its alignment and every spin-up afterwards takes it further along. The ending was settled by the fall; each start since then has brought it nearer.
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.