The IT support technician at a primary school in Rugby rang on behalf of a teacher whose external drive had failed. It had been making noises for a fortnight, which she had mentioned to nobody, and then stopped being readable altogether. On it were eleven years of lesson plans, resources, photographs of displays and the assessment records for her current class. There was no backup, on the school system or anywhere else. The technician had unplugged it as soon as he saw it and had not tried anything further, which was the most useful thing anyone did that week.
| Media | A mechanical external hard disk belonging to a teacher, which had been audible for a fortnight before it stopped being readable. There is no copy of the contents anywhere. It holds eleven years of teaching material. |
| What was reported | External hard disk, making noises for around a fortnight, now failed and unreadable, all the owner's material on it, no backup on the school system or elsewhere, unplugged by the school technician and not tried since, reported through school IT support. |
| Fault class | Mechanical wear. The noise over a fortnight was the head assembly and the spindle struggling, and the eventual failure was that struggle finishing. The recorded surfaces were expected to be largely intact, with some risk of light marking from a fortnight of a mechanism working at the edge of its tolerance. |
| On the bench | Not powered after arrival, since a drive that has already been audible for two weeks has spent its margin. Removed from the enclosure and profiled on a current-limited bench supply to capture the start behaviour as a trace. Opened under laminar flow with the head assembly, the landing zone and every surface examined under a stereo microscope, matched donor heads fitted and the alignment set. Imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA head by head with weak areas deferred to targeted passes, and the material parsed out in R-Studio and opened before release. |
Two weeks of noise is a fortnight of warning that most people do not recognise. Drives are quiet when they are well. A change in sound is the mechanism telling you something has shifted, and it almost always precedes failure by days or weeks rather than months. Anyone who hears a new noise from a drive has a window in which copying the contents is trivial, and that window is the cheapest recovery available.
No backup changes the engineering as well as the stakes. Where a copy exists, a bench can afford to be aggressive: try the fast approach, and if the drive deteriorates the copy is still there. With no copy at all every decision has to be the cautious one, the imaging order is planned around what matters most, and nothing is retried in place. It is slower and it is the only responsible way to work.
Unplugging it immediately was worth more than any tool. The technician recognised what he was looking at and stopped, which meant the drive arrived having run for a fortnight rather than a month. Every additional hour of a struggling head over a surface is a chance of marking, and marking is the difference between everything coming back and a list of what did not.
Assessment records were the part that could not be replaced. Lesson resources can be rebuilt over a summer, painfully. Assessment records for a live class cannot, and they were prioritised in the imaging order so that if the drive gave out part way through, the irreplaceable material was already secured. That is a decision made before the first pass, not during it.
The disk came out of its enclosure and went onto a current-limited supply. It reached speed but drew unevenly and the seek pattern was irregular, which is a head assembly that is worn rather than one that has failed cleanly. Nothing was connected to a host at any point.
Under laminar flow two heads showed wear at the sliders and one had picked up contamination. Both platters were examined across the full radius and carried light marking in one band, consistent with a fortnight of running rather than a single event. Matched donor heads were fitted and the alignment set, and imaging ran head by head on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, taking the assessment records and lesson folders first and leaving the marked band until the end. R-Studio read the filesystem out of the completed image.
The assessment records came back whole, as did the lesson plans, the resources and the display photographs. Around three hundred files from the marked band were incomplete and were returned as a list rather than buried in the set, and most turned out to be duplicates of material that existed elsewhere on the drive.
A single disk is £300 + VAT. Opening it under laminar flow and fitting donor parts is physical work under the published exclusion, so 50% of the quote was settled upfront and the balance after the school had confirmed the records opened.
Copy everything off it today, while it still reads, and do not wait for a convenient moment. A new noise is the most reliable warning a drive gives, and the fortnight between the sound starting and the drive failing is the cheapest and most complete recovery you will ever have. If it has already stopped being readable, unplug it and leave it unplugged rather than trying it each morning to see whether it has settled, because every run with a worn head is a chance of marking the surface. Do not run a repair or error-checking utility on a drive that is making a noise, since that will read the entire surface and is exactly the wrong thing to ask of a failing mechanism. Send the unit whole if it is an external in its own case, and say how long the noise went on for, because that estimate is what the bench uses to decide how carefully to plan the first pass.
What this job cost, and on what terms. This one was charged at £300 + VAT, the figure agreed in writing before any work began. Paying for a job like this one. This file sits in the half the guarantee does not reach. Four sorts of work are excluded from no fix, no fee and there are no others: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. On any of them half the quoted figure is settled before the bench starts, with the remainder due when the files go back. Everything outside those four — a deletion, a formatted card, a broken file system, a lost partition, and firmware or service-area repair, which counts as logical however it sounds — runs under no fix, no fee, so an attempt that fails costs nothing.
If yours is doing the same thing. This drive was read at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles down the M40. Post it tracked and insured, send it by a courier you book yourself, or bring it to the Oxford reception during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — there is no collection service and no counter in Coventry. The free look at it takes two working days from booking in and produces one written figure that then holds.
Freephone 0800 689 0668 to talk it through first. The shipping form and what goes in the parcel are on the contact page, and every band is published in full — including which work sits outside no fix, no fee.
These are real enquiries, from households and from businesses in Coventry and out across Warwickshire — Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam. Names are gone: the customer, the company, the job title, anything at all that would point back at a person. What stays is the reasoning — what turned up, where the fault genuinely sat, which approach it demanded, and which machine on the bench did the work. One of the thirty-six was refused, and it earns a place here as squarely as any of the rest.
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A drive that has been making a noise? Ring 0800 689 0668 and stop using it. One disk is £300 + VAT and the diagnostic is free.