Portable drives · job notes · RDG-2025-1785
The Repair Shop Had Called It Correctly.
He called a day before the parcel arrived. In a Thatcham office the cable had snagged on the armrest of a chair, pulling the Seagate from the desk mid-transfer. Whoever looks after the site laptops opened it up, closed it again and simply stated: the ticking is the head stack, not the motor
. And also: you want a lab, and that is not us
. He had bought the drive secondhand off an online advert, and what it held was my whole working life is on there — every driveway, every patio
.
Same fault on yours? Tell us what it is doing.
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What actually caused it.
He had been told the truth. The truth just stops at the door of a lab bench. Flying height is manufactured to an exact dimension and measured in nanometres; therefore a bent arm could never be corrected back to true by anyone. For the work to continue, either a stack from the same production run has to go in or the job ends there. At least this part of it could all be said over the phone. What can't be agreed beforehand is the condition of the discs. If a slider lands on the coating during the fall, the marks will have to be worked around rather than read through. No one knows which of these they have until the lid is removed; that is exactly why the look is free and the figure does not come until afterwards, in writing.
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 | Each donor head graded against the others once data started coming back | 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 |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Ordered the work so the marked band came only after the clean areas | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Pulled the firmware's service log — the history a used drive cannot hide | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
What the bench did.
Look at the discs before promising anybody anything
Under magnification, their verdict held: one arm sat higher than the others, and if the stack is out of true, no tracking can happen at all. The real question was the platters. At some point in the drive's past a slider had made contact with the surface, and a faint ring was left on the second side: light marking, not the deep scoring that would end a job instantly. The service log also revealed that sectors had been retiring quietly long before this unit was even sold on.
Fitting a donor stack where there is no room
A slim Seagate portable has almost no spare room inside, so the donor has to be a close match: family and firmware generation both have to agree, and the label narrows the search without settling it. The right unit was already on our shelf. Once it was fitted, the disc spun up and stayed up, and each head was graded on its own before any bulk copying.
The sound surfaces first, the ring last
The good areas all came off in one run, start to finish, while the fitted stack was still fresh. We left the marked band until last and were very gentle with it: short passes, just a few retries, resting for a little time in between. It gave back a fair share of what it had on it, but nothing after that point, and that is where we left it.
What went back.
Most of what was stored on the drive came back intact on fresh media; the site photos from years of work have been checked over, sorted by the address of each job and stored in their proper place. The report is just as plain about what did not come back. One entire folder (the images from his first summer of trading) sat under the marked ring and never came off it. These were the images he needed for a warranty dispute with a customer. Considering it was a used disk pulled off a desk in the middle of a copy, with no backup copy anywhere, that is still a decent result.
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.