Board-level faults · power surge · RDG-2025-1764
I Took the Cover Off to Look for Stuck Heads.
The awkward part came out before the parcel had even been taped up in Caversham; he volunteered it. One evening a storm sat over the town, his street went dark twice within ten minutes, and from that evening onwards his desktop's WD Blue would do one thing only — tick, once a second, and nothing else
. Stuck heads make that noise, he had read somewhere, so I had the cover off on the kitchen worktop by ten o'clock
. Nothing under it struck him as wrong, which left, as he saw it, either the board or the motor, one of those two
. The fault itself did not worry us. The open cover did.
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What actually caused it.
The expensive part of opening a drive is not the opening. It is that the thing carries on running afterwards. On a modern disk the steel top is not a lid at all but part of the seal, and beneath it heads travel two or three nanometres above platters that are turning fast, in a clearance narrower than any particle drifting round a kitchen. Undo four screws and, that night, nothing appears to have changed. The bill turns up later. Whatever the electricity ruined stays ruined, and household dust is now lying across the surfaces your photographs are written to.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Put it down to the electronics rather than the mechanism, and identified the component that had gone | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Ran a slow image, working on the basis that kitchen air had already reached those surfaces | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Rebuilt the file system and opened every photograph in it | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Clean the platters before the spindle turns
What he did next saved the job: nothing plugged in, screws back in, drive into a bag. The microscope found a fair load sitting on the top platter — grit, and fibres of the kind that come off a jumper or a tea towel, nothing a breather filter would ever have passed. Every trace of it was lifted off before any power went near the spindle. Leave a particle on a platter and it becomes a cutting edge the moment a head passes over it.
Then measure what the surge had taken
A dirty surface cannot be trusted to report anything accurately, which is why the cleaning came first. Heads, motor and platters then all tested sound, leaving the electronics, and within them a single part: the motor driver chip, which the surge had finished. A drive unable to get up to speed retries about once a second, and a metal case makes that all but indistinguishable from a head problem. His reading of it was reasonable enough. The drive was simply misdescribing itself.
Board on, then image it gently
A matching-revision donor board replaced it, with the ROM off the damaged one carried across; strip that chip out and a replacement board knows nothing whatever about the drive it has been fitted to. The image was then taken at a deliberately low pace with retries limited, since kitchen air had been over those platters and no process undoes that. It reached the end regardless.
What went back.
Not a frame was lost: three winters of Caversham shopfronts, and the people behind the counters, photographed for the residents' newsletter he edits. How close that came to going the other way is not something we spelled out at the time. Everything is on two drives now, and the Torx set has not come out since.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
More jobs that began with the power.
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.