A photographer in Stratford-upon-Avon who shoots productions and rehearsals keeps her working archive on a WD My Passport for Mac. It began mounting slowly, then mounting and hanging, and now it takes Finder down within a minute on either of the two Macs in the studio, forcing a restart each time. Her partner had tried it perhaps fifteen times over a weekend on the theory that it worked once so it might work again. Eight years of production photography were on it, with a book being put together from the earliest of it.
| Media | A WD My Passport for Mac that mounts and then hangs, taking Finder down within a minute on either of two Macs and forcing a restart. It carries eight years of production photography. |
| What was reported | WD My Passport for Mac, mounting slowly at first and now hanging, crashes Finder on both studio Macs within a minute, tried around fifteen times over a weekend, eight years of photography wanted with the earliest material needed for a book. |
| Fault class | A failing head. One surface had degraded to the point where reads from it stalled rather than returned, and a Mac waits on a stalled read instead of abandoning it, which is why the whole interface froze. The remaining surfaces were healthy and most of the archive sat on them. |
| On the bench | Taken off any live machine and read behind a hardware write blocker so it could not be left struggling. Profiled on a current-limited bench supply and then opened under laminar flow, with the head assembly 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 so the healthy surfaces could be secured first, and the archive parsed in R-Studio with every folder rendered as thumbnails before release. |
A frozen Mac is a symptom of the drive, not of the Mac. When an application asks for data, the system waits for it. If the drive neither returns the data nor reports an error, that wait has no natural end, and the interface locks up because it is still being patient. People blame the computer and reinstall things. The computer is behaving exactly as designed.
Getting slower before it froze is the shape of a head going. Read attempts that need several tries take longer but still succeed, so the drive feels sluggish. As the surface degrades further those retries stop succeeding, and the drive sits in its retry loop indefinitely. The progression from slow to hanging over a fortnight is a mechanical story, not a filesystem one.
Fifteen attempts over a weekend cost more than it seemed to. Every mount asks the failing head to read the same structures at the front of the volume again, and every stalled read is the head working over a surface that is already deteriorating. Nothing dramatic happens on any single attempt, which is precisely why people keep going. The bill for it arrives later, in the form of a wider band of unreadable material.
The order in which a damaged drive is imaged decides what you get. With one bad surface and three good ones, taking the good ones first secures three quarters of the archive before anything else can go wrong. Working through the volume in the order the filesystem happens to list it would have meant repeatedly returning to the bad surface, which is how a drive that could have given ninety per cent gives forty.
The unit arrived complete in its own case, which is how an external drive travels, and was never connected to a live machine. On the bench supply it spun and reached speed normally, and behind a write blocker it identified itself and then stalled hard on a specific range, which is what a single failing head looks like when the rest of the drive is healthy.
Under laminar flow one head showed clear wear at the slider and the surface beneath it carried light marking over a band; the other surfaces and their heads were sound. Matched donor parts were fitted and the alignment set. Imaging ran head by head on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, taking the three healthy surfaces to completion first and then working the marked band last at reduced speed. R-Studio assembled the volume from the finished image and every folder was rendered as thumbnails and inspected.
About ninety-two per cent came back whole, including all of the early material the book needed, which sat on a healthy surface. Roughly nine hundred photographs from three seasons in the middle of the archive were damaged or absent and were listed by filename and date, which let her go back to the theatres involved and ask whether anyone still had the delivered sets.
One disk is £300 + VAT. Opening it and fitting donor parts is physical work under the published exclusion, so 50% was settled upfront and the balance once she had been through the recovered folders.
Unplug it and stop trying, because a freeze is the drive stalling and each attempt is another pass over a surface that is already failing. Do not run the disk utility's repair function on it, and do not let the system verify the volume, since both read the whole structure and will sit there stalling for hours. If the drive mounts long enough to copy something, copy the most valuable folder first rather than browsing to see what is there, and expect it to drop out part way through. Force-restarting the machine does no harm to the computer but does nothing for the drive either. Send the unit whole in its own enclosure with its cable, and tell the bench which folders matter most and roughly when they were written, because with a failing surface the imaging order is a real decision and the answer to it should come from you rather than from a guess.
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 mac disk 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.
Storage soldered to a mainboard is outside intake, and saying so on day one is worth more than a long shot
Whether this is possible at all is decided by the model, and that is the first question to settle
A confirmed mechanical diagnosis is a starting point, not a verdict
A drive that freezes your Mac? Ring 0800 689 0668 and leave it disconnected. One disk is £300 + VAT and the assessment is free.