Mac drives · case closed · RDG-2025-1771
Ten Minutes On, and She Pulled the Lead.
Ten whole minutes of that spinning colour wheel
one morning, and she pulled out the cable, convinced the Mac had hung
. On the two attempts that followed, the Backup Plus would not appear anywhere at all
. Piano lessons around Shinfield are her living, and that drive rode to them and home again in a car boot. What sat on it was eleven years of recordings: the copies pupils are sent home with. No other set existed.
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What actually caused it.
A Mac shows you no volume at all until the entire catalogue has been pulled through, and hers sat directly over a weakening stretch of surface. So the ten-minute wait was the disk's doing and not the computer's — one sector asked for, refused, asked for again, over and over, with the Finder waiting behind it. And then the instinctive thing happens: unplug, plug back in, have another go. Every one of those attempts hauls the heads across the frailest ground on the platter again. What answers slowly in March may give no answer at all by April.
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 | Made the copy at a controlled pace, with no operating system ever touching the volume | 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 |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Reassembled HFS+ from the image with the catalogue in one piece | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Reached service mode and drew the map of the weak band underneath | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
What the bench did.
Logged on arrival, and kept away from every computer in the building
Bench hardware took the Seagate the moment it was logged, and nothing carrying an operating system went near the drive after that. Service mode gave the answer straight away: a band of sectors failing and widening, lying right across the area HFS+ uses for its catalogue. That accounts for the ten minutes of waiting, and for the morning the volume never appeared at all.
Catalogue first, audio second, and nothing hurried
Sequence mattered more than throughput here. The catalogue and the metadata were taken first, slowly, with retries kept short — those few small regions are what put a pupil's name and a lesson date back on every file. Audio followed. And to settle the question she had been carrying around: unplugging it had not made anything worse.
Nothing was mended on the Seagate itself, only on its image
The Seagate itself was never repaired — every operation ran on the completed image instead. Reverse those two steps and eleven years returns as an unnamed heap instead of folders arranged by pupil and by year. Structure, names and dates all came back with the audio.
What went back.
Her folders arrived in the shape she had built them, and she refused to sign anything off until she had sat and played lessons recorded on both sides of the fault, three years each way. Nine came back incomplete — all of them from the worst of that band — and every one is identified in the report.
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More Apple machines in the casebook.
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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.