Portable drives · job notes · RDG-2025-1785
The Repair Shop Had Called It Correctly.
His call came a day before the parcel did. In a Thatcham office a chair arm had caught the cable and pulled the Seagate off the desk mid-transfer. Whoever looks after the site laptops opened it up, closed it again and gave it to him straight — the ticking is the head stack, not the motor
— then added: you want a lab, and that is not us
. The drive had come secondhand off an online advert, and what it carried 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, and the truth still stops at the door of a clean-air bench. Flying height is fixed in manufacture and measured in nanometres, so a bent arm cannot be returned to true by anybody. Either a stack from the same production run goes in, or the job ends there — and that much can be said on the telephone. What cannot be settled in advance is the state of the discs. If a slider comes down on the coating during the fall, the result is marking that must be worked round instead of read through. Nobody knows which of those they have until the lid is off, and that is exactly why the look is free and the figure only comes 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 riding higher than its neighbours, and a stack out of true will not track anything at all. The platters were the open question. Somewhere in the drive's earlier life a slider had touched down, and the second surface carried a pale ring because of it — light marking, rather than the deep scoring that ends a job there and then. What the service log added was the earlier history: sectors had been retiring quietly well before this unit ever changed hands.
Fitting a donor stack where there is no room
A slim Seagate portable has almost nothing spare inside it, and a mechanism packed that tightly will accept only a narrow range of donors: family and firmware generation both have to match, and what is printed on the label narrows the search without deciding it. The right unit was already on our shelf. Fitted under laminar flow, the disc spun up and stayed up, each head graded individually ahead of any bulk copying.
The sound surfaces first, the ring last
The clean areas came off in one run, end to end, while the fitted stack was still fresh. The marked band was left until afterwards and treated gently — short passes, few retries, a rest in between. It gave back a fair share of what it held, then stopped giving anything more, and that is where we left it.
What went back.
Most of what was on the drive came back, on fresh media: years of site photographs, checked over and refiled under the address each job belongs to. The report is just as plain about the part that did not. One folder — his first summer of trading — sat under the marked ring and never came off it. Those were the pictures he needed for a warranty argument with a customer. For a used disk pulled off a desk mid-copy, with nothing copied anywhere else, that is still a decent outcome.
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.