Portable hard drives · bench notes · RDG-2025-2075
It Rattled for Days. Then No Machine Would List It.
A building surveyor in Hungerford keeps her working drive in the van, inside a toolbox jammed behind the seats: it goes wherever I go
. All summer that was fine. Then a barn conversion out past Inkpen put her on rutted farm track twice a day for a fortnight, and afterwards it rattles the moment it starts spinning
. A few more days of use and nothing would list it at all: Disk Management cannot see it either
. Neither machine would show it — the laptop in the van, the desktop at the office — and a new cable made no difference
.
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What actually caused it.
Very little inside a hard drive is supposed to move at all. The discs turn on a spindle, the heads ride across them on an arm, and there is nothing else to it. So a rattle at spin-up narrows to a short list of causes: a loose screw, a sheared component, or slack where the head assembly ought to be rigid. Half the diagnosis was done before she posted it — two computers, an unopened cable, the same silence each time, which puts the fault inside the sealed body. And every revolution hands that loose piece another pass across a surface. Looking costs nothing, which is the argument for posting on the day the noise starts rather than a week later.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaged the rebuilt drive surface by surface, with every limit kept short | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 | Head map first: five surfaces answering, the sixth scored round the outside | 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 | Rebuilt the NTFS folder tree from the finished image | Opens volumes other tools refuse: APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs |
What the bench did.
First, what had worked loose in there
The fault was in plain sight the moment the lid came off under laminar flow. Sheared clean at the actuator, the end stop had left its broken half rolling loose in the casing. Play in the head stack measured far beyond anything the design permits, and one suspension no longer sat square. A stack that slack will put a head down on a platter at almost any seek, so every surface went to the stereo microscope and the discs were graded before anything else could be decided.
Mechanics right, then measure the damage
One matched donor supplied both parts — the failed head stack and a sound end stop — and the rebuilt drive was asked for a head map before it was asked for a single file. Five surfaces answered cleanly. The sixth was scored right round its outer edge. Those extra days of use after the rattle began are what that band cost her.
One controlled pass, then the drive is retired
One sitting, one copy. The five good surfaces came off at pace; the scored band was held until the end and then crept through with no limit on it, the imager waiting for whatever each sector took. Donor heads buy access, not repair: this drive had been rebuilt for exactly one task, it finished that task, and it left the bench for good.
What went back.
Six surfaces, five of them recovered whole. On the sixth sat part of a church survey; each document that did not come back is named individually in the report, with no percentages anywhere in it. Two drives hold the archive now, and the van carries neither. The figure was agreed before any chargeable work began — £300 + VAT, the published band for one drive.
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.