Portable drives · job record · RDG-2025-1775
The BIOS Names It. Windows Locks Up.
Nine years of paperwork sat on one external drive at an independent garage on School Road in Tilehurst — scanned receipts, VAT workings, invoice runs — and the accountant had been chasing a set of year-end figures off it for the better part of twelve months. The boot screen finds it every time, no bother at all
, said the owner. Get as far as Windows, though, and everything freezes until I pull the plug out
.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
0800 6890668
What actually caused it.
Both are telling the truth about different things. All the BIOS requires is an introduction — model, capacity, a few parameters — and any drive that turns and can talk to its own controller manages that much. Windows then asks for the contents: partition table, filesystem records, and after that sector upon sector, each returned inside a deadline set in fractions of a second. Go past it and the drive is dropped from the bus. A disk that clears the introduction and fails the contents is failing at the only task it exists for. There are two usual causes: firmware that stops functioning the moment user data is requested, or media so worn that a read keeps exceeding the time it is given.
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 | Answered the question the rest of the job hangs on: firmware, or worn media | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Imaged with the deadlines removed altogether and nothing timing it | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| R-Studio Technician | Reassembled the NTFS volume once the image was complete | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
Decide between the two before the disk spins again
Firmware was in good order — the service area came back on request, every module present and legible. The failure sat in the media. Sectors did arrive, individually, several seconds apart. That alone accounts for the symptom, because Windows waits a fraction of a second and then gives a drive no further time.
Copy it with the clock switched off
Windows has no patience with a slow disk; a bench imager has nothing else, and that is most of the difference between them. Deadlines were lifted entirely, stalls were cleared with a measured reset rather than a storm of retries, and the rate was allowed to sink to whatever the worn regions could manage. It took several days, and at the end of them the whole disk was in an image.
From here on, only the copy is touched
The partition table and the NTFS records came out of that image, the volume went back together, and a year of being unreachable ended at the first attempt: ledgers, invoice runs, scanned receipts.
What went back.
One worn band held onto its contents to the last, and among them were a handful of scanned receipts. That is the entire loss. Invoices, complete. VAT workbooks, complete. The nine years of records went back to Tilehurst on a new drive at the published single-drive band, £300 + VAT, agreed in writing beforehand.
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.