Job notes · Portable drives · RDG-2025-1472
A Lit Lamp, and No Sound From the Case.
Three winters of scanning, undone in one knock. A retired bricklayer up in Tilehurst had been working through his cine films at a spool an evening, emptying the slide trays alongside them, everything landing on the same drive — right up to the evening it tipped over onto its side mid-copy
. Since then: the little lamp is lit, same as ever
, you cannot hear a thing from it
, not a tremor through the case, and neither computer will even see it
.
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What actually caused it.
That lamp is wired to the power rail and to nothing else. It tells you volts arrived at the enclosure; of the disk behind it, the LED knows precisely nothing. Where there is no spin-up at all, three things can be holding a mechanism like this: heads sitting down on recorded surface and stuck fast, a seized bearing under the spindle, or electronics that never issue the start command. On a bench supply each draws its own distinctive curve, so telling them apart takes a couple of minutes. He had a replacement cable standing by. It would have changed nothing whatever.
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 | The shape of the draw, plus the drive's own answers, put the fault in the mechanics | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Copied the lot in a single pass once the heads were off the surfaces | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| R-Studio Technician | Rebuilt the directory tree, then opened every file rather than trusting a count | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Onto the meter first
The USB lead came off and a metered supply went on, which shows you what no laptop ever can. Current draw rose steeply as the motor tried to take hold, then levelled off against whatever was gripping the pack; run it again and the same shape came back. Electronics with nothing left in them draw low and flat from beginning to end, and this did not. That single curve located the fault.
Ease the heads off the platters
In clean air the mechanics said exactly what the meter had. Because it tipped over mid-write, the actuator never received anything resembling a park instruction: both heads had come to rest on recorded surface, holding the pack where rotation had stopped. Each was lifted off separately, with the band of platter underneath it examined under a stereo microscope first — leave a head lying there and it works its own way down into the data.
One start-up, then copy everything
With them off, the motor lifted straight away and the drive gave its identity properly. All surfaces were then copied in a single unbroken run — nothing opened on the way, nothing browsed. Anything that has stuck on you once is capable of doing it again, and it will not announce itself first.
What went back.
Everything came back: the reels he had scanned, the slide trays too, every file checked onto fresh media before it was sealed. Not a mark anywhere on the platters, which is what you get when a drive is left alone instead of being plugged in again and again. The S3 was scrapped. Three copies of the films exist now, one of them at his sister's.
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Other portable drives on the log.
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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.