Damaged connectors · bench record · RDG-2025-1768
It Was Still Copying When It Left the Desk.
Nearly two years of fieldwork interviews were coming off a tired laptop when the lead caught the foot of a postgraduate from Whiteknights, who lives out at Earley on the A329(M). Her Canvio, she says, dropped straight off the desk, still copying
. What went with it was the socket: the lead pulled the socket clean out of it
. Since then the drive will grunt once and give up
, and not one machine in the house can find it
. About the timing she was right.
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What actually caused it.
One question decides jobs like this: were the platters spinning as it went? Heads on an idle drive are parked on a ramp clear of the platter altogether, nowhere near recorded surface, and a fall from a desk in that state frequently does no harm whatever. Mid-copy is a different matter. No ramp is involved: sliders out over live tracks, arm in motion, and the thing is over before firmware gets any chance to retract. Two drops that look identical from the far side of a room can bill out very differently indeed. This was the expensive kind.
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 | Head-by-head grading came first, and what it found set the order the surfaces were imaged in | 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 | Carried the copy, and each time the drive hung it was reset on the bench rather than by Windows | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the volume off the image, and lifted the half-written folder out of it intact | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Nothing turns until the platters have been looked at
Damage taken in flight is never spread about evenly, and in clean air the stack was a textbook example of it. Two sliders had plainly taken the hit; the others looked much as they ought to. Along the arc the arm had been shoved through ran a narrow band of scuffing — shallow, but real — and nothing like the deep circular scoring that decides a job the moment the lid is off.
Donor stack fitted, surfaces surveyed, running order set
The survey sets the running order, and there is no survey until the drive can read at all — so the matched donor stack went in first. With new heads fitted, the clean zones came off quickly, while those heads were at their best. The scuffing was saved for the end, then worked across slowly, with resets and the power switch inside arm's reach.
The scuffing was already done before it reached us
That band held whatever had been under the sliders when it landed, so it was left to the end of the job and worked slowly with the retry allowance wound right out. The bulk of it came back. At no point did Windows get near the drive: the imager put one request to each sector, and only ever one.
What went back.
Nearly all of it came home. What she lost was a short run of interviews inside the scuffed strip, each one listed by filename in the report. As for the folder that was half-written when the lead caught her foot: that was pulled out of the image complete, only hours after the drive itself had been boxed for return.
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.