Case notes · PCs & notebooks · RDG-2025-1476
Two Verdicts From One Disk. The Scan Is the Honest One.
An IdeaPad sold, a buyer waiting, and a wipe to do before handover — that is where this one started. The electrician who owned it ran Lenovo's own diagnostics first. It handed him two answers, and they contradict each other flatly: the health check says it is fine, but the long test fails part way through every single time
. The conclusion he drew was fair enough — if the laptop works, the problem must be the disk
— and all he actually wanted off it was three folders.
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What actually caused it.
Think of SMART as a disk marking its own homework. It keeps a handful of counters and compares them against limits the maker set generously, which is how a thoroughly worn drive can still return the word pass. The long test does something else entirely: it walks the whole surface and stops dead at the first block it cannot get through. Neither result is a lie, and the gap between them is the informative part. Trust the one that actually flew a head across the platters. Most disks give you no warning whatsoever. His had been signalling for months.
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 vendor's own logs and defect tables came off first — a SMART readout shows none of it | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Two runs at the image: everything that answered readily, then the reluctant band | 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 |
| R-Studio Technician | Lifted the three folders off the image, then opened each file one by one | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Look beneath the verdict
Underneath, the figures were far less comfortable: reallocated sectors rising every month across most of a year, more addresses still pending with nothing resolved, and one band of the platter answering far slower than the tracks either side of it. Nothing had crossed a threshold, so the drive carried on issuing itself a pass. That gap is where a great many disks fail.
Three folders were wanted; the whole disk got copied
Those three folders were scattered over every surface in the unit, so fetching them on demand would have sent the heads skipping about a platter set that was already going. One steady sweep from end to end treats the mechanics far more gently, leaving the difficult band to a closing pass. By the time it comes round, everything else is already safe on the copy — taken in the window while the drive was still willing.
A file listing proves nothing
Out of the finished image came job photographs, the accounts spreadsheets and years of correspondence. None of it was taken on trust: every file was opened, since a name in a directory listing tells you almost nothing about the thing beneath it. Every address that refused to read was then looked up in the file table. Not one of them sat inside the three folders he cared about.
What went back.
Woodley got its three folders back, checked file by file, and a full image of everything else is held here. The old disk never travelled with the IdeaPad; an SSD went in before the buyer collected it. It had been declining a good deal faster than its own self-assessment was prepared to say.
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Other PC and laptop jobs from the bench.
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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.