Mains-powered desk drives · job record · RDG-2025-1761
Fifteen Minutes of Life, and Then None.
Insulating a loft in Shinfield brought years of boxes down, and in one of them, tangled up with old leads, sat the Iomega. It worked for fifteen minutes. The volume mounted, folders appeared, and she got two or three of Grandad's scanned slides
open before it disappeared off the desktop mid double-click. Nothing she tried afterwards would touch it. Every machine returned the identical verdict — corrupted and unreadable
— on my laptop first, then the office one
. A powered hub, she added, changed nothing
. On the drive: her family history research, the scans themselves, and the accounts from the picture-framing shop she used to run.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
0800 6890668
What actually caused it.
'Corrupted' is Windows reporting that what came back was wrong. It describes a symptom; it diagnoses nothing. The useful clue was the timing — the drive gave out part of the way into a read, and that says tired mechanism, not magnetism fading off the platters. Machinery dislikes standing still for years: oil migrates, bearings settle into whichever position they were left in, sliders go dull. Ask a mechanism in that condition to deliver one long uninterrupted read and you have made the worst opening move there is.
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 | Ran a gentle profile, of the sort written for drives brought out of storage | 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 |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Took the defect tables and the reallocation figures, which showed what to keep away from | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the broken filesystem records, working only ever from the copy | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
No further USB, and no more experiments
It never went near another USB port. Bench power only, and the firmware was interrogated before anything else, because what the firmware says determines the order of everything after it. The grown defect list was already long and the spare sectors nearly used up. So: a single measured sweep of the whole surface, with nobody browsing folders first to see what was in there.
Low settings, for a mechanism that had been idle for years
The imager was set to take its time: read rate down, timeouts generous, a pause between zones so that nothing had the chance to warm up. At those settings the bulk of the surface came off quietly, and nearly every error logged belonged to a single head within one narrow band.
Mend the 'corruption' on the copy, never on the original
From the image, that alarming word turned out to mean very little. Some of the file system's own bookkeeping had lifted off the weak head and some had not. NTFS duplicates a good deal of that bookkeeping, and the duplicates covered the holes, so folders came back under the right names with the right dates on them. A small number of scans were all the head kept permanently.
What went back.
Every item — the research, the old accounts, the slides — was opened individually and checked. Nine of the scans were incomplete. All nine are named in the report, filename by filename; nothing at all was glossed over. The Iomega will not be going back up into the loft. The archive now lives on a pair of drives, both of them in use.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Other desk-drive jobs.
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.