Pocket hard drives · job notes · RDG-2025-2288
Every Client's Books Were on That Drive. No Machine Could See It.
Nothing announced it. Three years of daily use in a Thatcham bookkeeping practice — it had never once given me any trouble
— and then, in her words, I turned it off at teatime on Monday and on Tuesday it was gone
. The light came on as usual. In her hand the case was humming, exactly as it always did
. Yet Disk Management showed nothing at all, on any port, on any machine in the office. Three restarts and a second cable came before the phone call. On the contents she was blunt: the books I keep for every one of my clients are on that drive
.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
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What actually caused it.
The bridge board was the likely answer before the parcel even reached the bench, and two things pointed at it. Power reached the disk and the platters turned; not a single machine in that office could see it. Disks that are wearing out usually say so first — they slow down, they develop a noise nobody recognises, they vanish and come back over a fortnight, then they go for good. This one gave no notice whatever. It behaved like any ordinary Monday, and by Tuesday the office simply could not find it. Take the mechanism out of the picture and what is left is the electronics between the platters and the USB port; in a pocket-sized case there is really only one such part, and it is the bridge board. Two VAT returns and a year-end were all due within the same fortnight. Answer it one way and she loses an awkward week; answer it the other and a practice has nothing to file. It went ahead of everything else on the bench.
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 | Ran the disk directly on SATA: motor healthy, firmware answering, so the fault sat in the bridge | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| DeepSpar USB Imager | Kept the key-bearing USB board in circuit for every pass, so nothing needed unlocking afterwards | Copies at full rate straight through the enclosure's own USB board |
| R-Studio Technician | Lifted each client folder out of the image, working down her list of filing dates | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Opened the same day, because the filing dates would not wait
The disk was out of its case inside the hour and onto bench hardware, where it gave a straight answer to everything asked of it. Spin speed held, firmware responded without delay, and every head came back clean. That cleared the mechanism and left one candidate, so the copy was already running before lunch.
Throw that board away and the data goes with it
On a My Passport the key lives in the USB electronics and nowhere else, which is why fitting a donor board leaves you with an unreadable disk. Only half of this one had gone. Its USB side was finished; the rest of it woke up perfectly well on clean bench power, so it was left wired in until the copy was complete. The volume then opened off the image exactly as it always had.
Verify in the order the deadlines set
She emailed the dates, and the checking followed them exactly. The two VAT sets due soonest were opened ledger by ledger and sent back ahead of everything else, with the remainder verified afterwards. A deadline does not care about the rest of the disk. It cares about the right folders arriving on the right morning.
What went back.
Not one ledger was short, and both returns were in ahead of their filing dates. Something has changed since: at the end of each working day a second drive takes a copy of the client files.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Other portable drives on the log.
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.