An architect practising on her own in Warwick keeps finished project files on a 2TB portable drive, one folder per job, going back to when she set up. It stopped being readable and she sent it to be looked at. The report she got back said it needed a new head assembly, that the platters carried contact marks from the failed heads, and that the chance of success was fifty-fifty at best. She was not asking for a second opinion on the diagnosis. She wanted to know what fifty-fifty actually meant and what it would cost to find out.
| Media | A 2TB portable drive already examined elsewhere and found to need a replacement head assembly, with contact marking on the platters caused by the heads as they failed. It carries an architect's completed project files. |
| What was reported | 2TB portable drive, previously examined, a head assembly replacement identified as necessary, contact marks reported on the platters, the earlier assessment putting the chance at fifty-fifty at best, a costed opinion wanted. |
| Fault class | Head failure with surface contact. The heads had degraded and, in the process of failing, touched the platters and left marking. Replacing the heads is necessary before anything can be read, and any track lying under the marking has lost its magnetic layer and is gone. What is reachable is whatever the marked bands did not cross. |
| On the bench | Not powered on arrival, since turning marked platters spreads debris and widens the damage. Opened under laminar flow with the extent and depth of the contact marking mapped across every surface under a stereo microscope before any figure was agreed. Matched donor heads fitted and the alignment set. Imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in careful passes that took the intact radii first and stepped around the marked zones, with the recoverable material located in R-Studio and each project folder opened before release. |
Fifty-fifty is not a coin toss, it is an admission that nobody has looked closely yet. The odds on a marked platter are set by geometry: how wide the marked bands are, which radii they occupy, and what the filesystem happened to write there. None of that can be known from outside the casing, so an honest early estimate is a wide one. It narrows enormously the moment the lid comes off.
Contact marking and a dropped drive's scoring are related but not the same. Heads that fail gradually tend to touch lightly and repeatedly, leaving polished bands rather than deep cuts. Those bands can be shallow enough that some data still reads from them, which is why a careful pass is worth attempting rather than writing them off. Marking left by a violent contact is a different and worse picture.
Replacing the heads is necessary and is not sufficient on its own. New heads let the drive fly again, but they will also happily run over the marked areas and pick up debris, which contaminates them and then damages more of the surface. That is why imaging here is done in short passes, why the clean radii are taken first, and why nobody should be running a drive like this to see how it gets on.
Where a project folder sits on the disk decides its fate, and that is not fair. Files written early in the drive's life sit at the outer edge, where the marking on this unit was lightest. Recent jobs were nearer the middle and took the worst of it. The distribution of loss follows the disk's own layout rather than the importance of the work, and that is worth preparing an owner for.
The drive was opened without being powered. Under magnification the marking resolved into three bands, one narrow near the outer edge and two broader ones around the middle radii, present on both surfaces of the upper platter and only lightly on the lower. That map was the quotation conversation, and it was had before anything was agreed rather than after.
Matched donor heads went in and the alignment was set. Imaging ran on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, taking the outer radii first in short passes and pausing between them so the heads could be checked for pick-up. The marked bands were attempted last and at reduced speed, which returned partial reads from the narrowest of the three and nothing from the other two. R-Studio then assembled what existed from the image, and each project folder was opened and listed as complete, partial or absent.
Rather more than half came back. Every project from the first six years read out whole, the middle years were mixed, and the most recent eighteen months were largely on the worst-affected radii and were lost. She received a plain list of which jobs were complete, which had gaps and which were gone, which is what allowed her to go back to two clients and ask for drawings to be re-issued before anyone noticed.
One disk is £300 + VAT whatever the outcome band looks like. Opening it and fitting donor parts is physical work under the published terms, so 50% of the figure was settled upfront and the balance once she had the recovered projects.
Ask for the map rather than the odds. Marked or scored platters make partial recovery the realistic outcome, and the useful questions are how wide the marked bands are, which radii they sit on and whether both surfaces are affected. Any bench that has opened the drive can answer those, and the answers tell you far more than a percentage. Do not have the drive powered up again in the meantime, and do not let anyone attempt a read to see how much comes off, because each pass over a marked surface sheds debris that widens the damage and contaminates the new heads. Expect to be told that recovery is partial and expect a list of what came back rather than a headline number, because on a job like this a file list is the only honest deliverable. If the drive holds work you owe other people, start the conversation with them early rather than waiting for the result.
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.
Scoring removes the magnetic layer, so the honest question is how much of the surface it missed
A replacement board without the original ROM is a stranger's brain in the wrong body
Firmware repair looks like surgery and is treated as logical work, which is why it keeps the guarantee
Told a drive needs new heads and the platters are marked? Ring 0800 689 0668. One disk is £300 + VAT and the mapping is done before you commit.