External drives · bench record · RDG-2025-2274
The Scan Ran All Night. By Morning It Was Grinding.
He thought the scan was the fix. Twenty years of mobile DJ work around the Reading area sat on that Expansion — everything I have ever played, plus the mixes I made myself
— and Disk Management had begun listing the volume as unallocated
, with a button beside it inviting him to initialise. He declined, found a forum thread instead, and set DMDE going on my way up to bed
. Breakfast brought a log full of errors, page after page of them
, and underneath it a sound the drive had not made in twenty years: a grinding you could hear from the landing
. His message ended: it ran all night, which I now know was far too long
.
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What actually caused it.
One word does the damage: unallocated. It sends people to a scanner, and the scanner is where the harm begins. Worn heads are among the commonest reasons a disk cannot get through its own partition table, and by the time it cannot, it has generally stopped reading reliably. Aim a full-surface scan at hardware in that condition and those tired heads are flown over every sector on the platter, hour upon hour, with nothing built in to let them rest. Few of them last it out. Of the four in this drive, the weakest failed while he slept: the film of air that holds a head clear of the surface went, and it touched the coating. That is the noise that carried to the landing. Every sweep after that lifted more coating and returned nothing.
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 | Surveyed all four surfaces and marked the bands the scan had ruined as no-go | 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 | Long uninterrupted sweeps; the healthy ground copied before anything else | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Opened the volume and returned every track to the folder he had filed it in | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
Survey the damage before setting a price
Under the cover, the head stack was scrap. Scoring showed on both platters — faint over most of the disk, deep where the scan had spent longest. What saved this job was the hour he switched the thing off. A second night of it, rather than a halt at breakfast, and this page would be blank.
New heads, then a survey, and only then a figure
A donor stack of the right model brought it back to life, and the survey that followed drew a map of what still held. Long stretches read quickly and cleanly. Where the bands were scored, the signal faded and then there was nothing at all. He was given no figure until that map existed.
Clean ground in one pass, the scored bands afterwards
Every sweep was kept long and the actuator asked to move as little as the job allowed, because dragging a head across scored ground can carry loose particles into areas that are still intact. The healthy regions were copied first, in a single continuous pass, straight onto fresh media. The banded stretches yielded what they would afterwards, in short slow runs.
What went back.
Almost the whole library came back in the folder structure he had spent twenty years building. The gaps sit in the scored bands, and the report itemises them: a number of commercially released tracks, which can be bought a second time, and four of his own recordings, which cannot. That was set down plainly, without softening.
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.