Desk-powered externals · logged · RDG-2025-2053
Two Clicks, and Nothing Left of the Heads.
In a Thatcham household the USB port carried the blame for the best part of a year. Ten years of two children's lives sat on the Toshiba, and all anybody could point to was a drive slowing down a bit more every month
. Then Windows put up some sort of hardware error
and the port was in the clear. A neighbour's machine returned the same verdict: it never appeared on his laptop either
. After that the pattern settled: start up, click twice, and turn itself off
.
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What actually caused it.
A reserved band on the platters holds the calibration and adaptive tables, and no drive can introduce itself to a computer until it has lifted them. Heads this thin could not. Everything after that is designed behaviour: firmware allows two goes at the tables, with a recalibration between them, and then shuts the drive down rather than run on figures it has no confidence in. Those two goes are the clicks. The year of gradual slowing was the same wear piling up quietly, and Windows only put into words what the disk had been signalling for months.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Timed each head on the new stack, and let the results dictate the running order | It maps the heads before anything is taken off, keeps to one platter side per pass, and stays in charge of the resets, the timeouts and the power |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Worked through the passes, meeting stalls with a controlled reset or with a drop in power | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| R-Studio Technician | Reassembled the folder tree out of the completed image | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
What it sounded like was evidence in itself
Always two clicks, never three, and then it shut down. That is not a pattern ordinary use makes; it is what the power-on read makes, which put the reserved tracks at the top of the list of suspects. The microscope said the same. No chipping and no marks from impact — simply even wear along the sliders, after a very large number of powered hours.
Nothing else until the heads were dealt with
The replacement stack came from the same production run. With it fitted, the drive completed its start-up sequence, held power and reported its own model string. Surface mapping came straight afterwards rather than at the end, because degradation this gradual is rarely spread evenly, and only a map shows which regions of the platter still hold something worth taking.
Image it now, and let the good heads go first
A mechanism this far gone will not sit patiently through a second attempt, so imaging began the moment the repair was done and the drive stayed on the bench throughout. The healthy heads ran at full rate to start with. Anything doubtful was marked and left for slow passes once the rest was safe. With the reserved area legible again, the great majority came off quietly.
What went back.
The image came out complete. Files were extracted from the copy and never from the disk, and the folders were reviewed one year at a time before sign-off. Ten years of childhood photographs went back on fresh media. The Toshiba itself was scrapped — once a drive has worn its own heads away there is nothing in it worth keeping.
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Other desk-drive jobs.
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Post it in as it is, switched off. Looking costs nothing, and you get one fixed figure in writing before any chargeable work begins — £250 + VAT for a card or stick, £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID and NAS. On most jobs, nothing is charged unless your data comes back.