A retired maintenance fitter in Kenilworth runs the projection side of a film society that takes over the parish hall one Friday a month. The programme, the scanned handbills going back to the seventies and the digitised reels members have donated over the years all live on a WD My Passport, along with a folder he had always thought of as the backup. It shut him out halfway through an evening's preparation. The light still comes on, but plugging it in now locks File Explorer so hard that the window will not close, and the error check built into Windows, which he ran twice, made no difference to any of it.
| Media | A WD My Passport that stopped allowing access partway through a session and now locks File Explorer solid on connection, its indicator lit throughout. The error check built into Windows was run twice and changed nothing. It carries a film society's library. |
| What was reported | WD My Passport, lost access midway through an evening, indicator still lights on connection, File Explorer locks up and will not close, Windows error checking run twice with no change, the film library and a folder kept as a backup both wanted. |
| Fault class | Degraded sectors across one band, on a mechanism that was otherwise sound. Reads from that band neither returned data nor failed quickly, so the request stayed open and the machine sat waiting on it. The rest of the surface was in good order and nothing on the drive had been erased or written over. |
| On the bench | Kept away from any live machine and read behind a hardware write blocker, so no utility could act on it while it was connected. Assessed on PC-3000 UDMA first to establish whether the mechanism was sound, since a failing head produces the same symptom from a chair. Imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the timeouts shortened, the sound areas taken to completion before the weak band was approached at all, and that band then worked from both directions at reduced speed. The filesystem rebuilt from the image in R-Studio and a film from each decade played before release. |
The absence of an error message is itself the diagnosis. A drive that cannot read something is supposed to say so, and the machine then shrugs and carries on. This one said nothing, because it had not finished trying. Disks are built to have another go at a doubtful sector, over and over, and the request they were given stays open while they do it. The frozen window is that patience seen from the outside, and nothing has crashed.
The error check is the one tool guaranteed to make it worse. It does two things a struggling disk cannot afford. It reads structures spread across the whole volume, which means going straight to the region that is failing, and it writes its conclusions back onto a drive already having trouble holding what it has. Two runs are two more full passes over the weak part. That it appeared to change nothing was luck rather than reassurance.
Weak sectors and a dying head look the same from a chair and are different jobs. Both freeze the machine, both arrive gradually, and telling them apart decides everything after it. A head fault means the lid comes off, donor parts go in, and the work is billed as physical under the published exclusion. A degraded band on a sound mechanism means a read-only copy and a rebuild, at the ordinary rate for a single drive. An hour on the bench settles which of the two you have, and it is settled before any figure is agreed.
The folder he called the backup was on the failing drive. It is the commonest arrangement in this trade and it is not a backup at all, because a copy sharing a socket, a supply and a set of platters with the original fails at the same moment the original does. It cost him nothing here, since both came back. The assumption behind it is still worth naming, because it is why so many single-drive failures turn out to be total ones.
The unit arrived whole in its own case and was never connected to a computer. The first question was the mechanism, so it went onto a bench supply and then onto PC-3000 UDMA behind a write blocker: it started cleanly, sounded right and identified itself correctly. Its own logs showed a reallocation count that had been climbing for months and a growing list of sectors it had given up on, which is a surface problem on a healthy mechanism and kept the job on the logical side of the terms.
Imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA with the timeouts cut short, so a sector that wanted forty seconds was abandoned in two and left for later rather than fought over while the rest of the disk waited. The sound areas went first and finished intact. The weak band, about eleven gigabytes of it towards the outer edge, was then worked slowly from both directions and gave up most of what it held. R-Studio rebuilt the filesystem from the finished image.
The library came back, the handbill scans with it, and so did the folder he had been calling the backup. Nine files sat inside the weak band and came back short. Two of those were donated reels, which the members who gave them still had, and the rest were duplicates of material elsewhere on the same disk. He was handed a list of the nine rather than left to find them himself in a year's time.
One disk is £300 + VAT. Nothing was opened and no part was replaced, so no fix, no fee applied and the invoice went out after he had played a film off the new media rather than before.
Unplug it, and do not run the error check again. It is the natural thing to reach for and it is the wrong tool: it reads the whole volume, including the part that is failing, and writes its findings back onto a disk that is struggling to hold what it already has. The same goes for defragmenting, for optimising and for anything else that offers to scan the surface. If the drive does stay up long enough to open a folder, copy the single most valuable thing on it and stop, rather than browsing to see what still works, because every browse is another visit to the weak part. A drive in this state can be copied once, carefully, or used until it stops, and it cannot be both. Send the unit whole in its own case with its cable, and say what the error check reported and how many times it has run, because that is a fair guide to how much reading the disk has already been made to do.
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. Nothing here called for the disk to be opened, a board rebuilt or a chip lifted off, which puts the work on the logical side of the line and under no fix, no fee. Files back, invoice follows; nothing back, nothing owed, and the media goes home either way. Four sorts of work sit outside that promise and only those four: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. The rest keep it, firmware and service-area repair included — both are logical jobs whatever their reputation suggests.
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.
Enumerating and reading are two different jobs, and only one of them needs the platters to turn
A broken socket and a broken filesystem look equally fatal from a desk and are neither
Windows names the structure it could not read, not the file you were looking for
A drive that locks Windows up when you plug it in? Ring 0800 689 0668 and stop the scans. A single disk is £300 + VAT, and establishing which of the two faults it is costs nothing.