Apple machines · lab record · RDG-2025-1757
One Tick, a Silence, Then One More.
An open rucksack, a kerb in Earley just off the A329(M), and the drive was on the ground. Rubber cladding does a fine job of persuading people that nothing has happened. Twelve years of one measured-building surveyor's drawings, and the site photography that goes with them, were on it. After the fall, it will not mount on either Mac
, and held to an ear it gave one tick, several seconds of silence, then another — faint enough that you could talk yourself into having imagined it.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
0800 6890668
What actually caused it.
What your ear picks up is a description of the enclosure, not of the damage. Less air gets moved by a 2.5in platter than by a full-size one; a light shell conducts sound poorly; and the rubber round a Rugged exists precisely to soak up noise along with impact. The platters underneath are unaffected by any of it. Strip the shell away and both noises resolve into one event, repeated — the faint tick here, the heavier thud from a full-size desktop unit: a head goes looking for a servo mark, does not find it, backs off, and comes round to try once more. Every one of those passes takes it over the surface your files sit on.
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 | Graded the new heads once fitted, and let that decide 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 | Crossed the surface one band at a time, with every reset recorded | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Restored the whole HFS+ catalogue, which beats carving on an Apple volume | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Loud or faint, handled the same way
Nothing was powered until the drive lay open under a bench lamp. The platters showed ordinary damage in miniature — contact marks around the landing zone, the rest of the surface very nearly unmarked. Two attempts and he stopped, and there is almost nothing here worth photographing precisely because of that.
Sort the heads out before anything is imaged
A donor was accepted only once family and production window both agreed. Its stack went in, and each head was then tested by itself. Every one of them worked, but one noticeably more weakly than the rest, so the pass opened on the strongest and that head waited until the end.
Give HFS+ the structure it depends on
Whether an archive comes home as an archive or as a heap of numbered files turns on one structure in HFS+: the catalogue file, which carries the index of the entire volume. Lift that out of the image undamaged and everything else falls into line behind it. His did. The drawings arrived under their own names, foldered by year, carrying the dates each survey was recorded under, rather than as a pile to be opened one file at a time.
What went back.
Nothing was missing. Two jobs were opened out of the rebuilt volume, one from the oldest year on the disk and one from the newest — photographs in the first, drawings in the second. All of it came back because he made two attempts rather than twenty.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
More Apple machines in the casebook.
If that sounds like yours, stop there.
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.