A heritage society in Bedworth keeps its minute books, its transcribed interviews with retired pit men and about four thousand scanned photographs on one 500GB Seagate disk. A volunteer caught the lead with his foot at a Saturday open day and took the drive off a trestle table while it was still turning. A member with a reputation for mending things then took the lid off at his kitchen table to look inside. By the time it reached the bench there were marks on the top surface you could see without magnification, and the committee wanted a straight answer rather than an encouraging one.
| Media | A 500GB Seagate disk pulled off a table while powered, and afterwards opened away from any controlled bench by somebody trying to help. Scoring is visible on the upper surface. It carries a local heritage society's archive. |
| What was reported | 500GB Seagate, dropped while running, later opened at a kitchen table, visible marks across the platter, a society archive of minutes, interviews and scans on it, an honest verdict wanted before any money was spent. |
| Fault class | Two injuries laid on top of one another. The fall knocked the head stack out of true; turning the disk afterwards in ordinary room air dragged those damaged heads across the surface and cut into the recording layer. Whatever was written along the scored bands has physically gone. What remains is whatever the scoring happened to miss. |
| On the bench | Left unpowered from the moment the parcel was opened, since spinning a scored platter is how a partial loss turns into a complete one. Opened under laminar flow with the surfaces mapped for the width and depth of the scoring under a stereo microscope, the platters cleaned by approved methods, a matched donor head stack fitted and the alignment set. Imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in short passes routed around the damaged bands, with the society's documents assembled in R-Studio and checked one at a time. |
Two things happened to this disk and only the second one was serious. A fall while the platters are turning usually ends with the heads out of position or broken off their arms, and that on its own is ordinary work with a well understood answer. The damage that decides this case came later, when the lid went back on and the drive was powered up in a kitchen with a head stack that was no longer flying.
There is no repairing a scratch, and it is kinder to say so early. Data on a platter is a pattern held in a thin magnetic film a few tens of nanometres deep. A head dragging across it does not smear that film, it removes it. Once removed there is nothing left to read by any instrument at any price, which is why nobody in this trade will quote you a percentage over the phone for a scored disk.
What survives is described by a map rather than a number. Scoring tends to run as rings, because the arm sits at one radius and the platter turns beneath it. Files written inside or outside those rings are untouched and read normally once a working head stack is fitted. So the useful question is not how bad it looks but which radii the marks occupy and what the filesystem put there, and both are bench findings.
The one instruction that mattered had already been ignored twice. A dropped disk should be unplugged and left alone; an opened one should never be run. Neither is a rule invented to protect a laboratory's fees. Each additional revolution with a damaged head over the surface widens the rings and takes more of the archive with it, and the society's drive had run for perhaps fifteen minutes across those two events.
Nothing was connected. The disk went straight under laminar flow, where the extent of the scoring could be established before any decision about cost. Under magnification the marks resolved into two bands on the upper surface of the top platter, roughly a third of the way out and again near the outer edge, with the lower surface and the second platter clean. That distribution was the whole prognosis, and it was reported to the committee before a figure was agreed.
The platters were cleaned by approved methods to lift the debris the scoring had shed, since loose material is what turns two rings into six. A matched donor head stack went in and the alignment was set. Imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the head map watched throughout, taking the clean radii first in short passes and stepping around the damaged bands rather than grinding at them. R-Studio then read the filesystem out of the image and each recovered document was opened rather than counted.
The minute books came back whole, as did the interview transcripts and about nine tenths of the scanned photographs. Roughly four hundred images had lived on the scored bands and are gone for good; the society was given their filenames so it knows which negatives to re-scan rather than wondering forever what was lost.
A single disk is £300 + VAT. Opening one under laminar flow and fitting donor parts is physical work, which the published exclusion covers, so 50% of the figure was settled upfront and the balance fell due once the archive was in the society's hands.
Take it out of service and leave it out. The most common way a recoverable disk becomes an unrecoverable one is a well meaning second attempt: the lid comes off in a room full of dust, the drive is powered to see whether it sounds better, and the heads cut the surface. If that has already happened, it is not the end of the enquiry, because scoring is usually local and a great deal often survives beyond it. What you should not do is run it again to check. Post the bare disk in a rigid box with foam either side, tell the bench honestly how long it ran after the fall and after the opening, and expect the prognosis to arrive only once the platters have been looked at under magnification.
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.
A replacement board without the original ROM is a stranger's brain in the wrong body
A quoted chance of fifty-fifty is an honest way of saying the answer is in the geometry
Firmware repair looks like surgery and is treated as logical work, which is why it keeps the guarantee
A dropped disk that has already been opened? Ring 0800 689 0668 and stop powering it. Assessment is free, a single disk is £300 + VAT, and the scoring is mapped before anything is agreed.