A product design consultancy in Solihull, most of whose work goes to the vehicle industry at Gaydon, knocked a 4TB external drive off a desk while it was running. It fell a short way onto a rug, buzzed for a second or two and stopped. Their own IT man opened it that afternoon, found a head sitting out on the disk instead of parked at the side, lifted it clear and put the cover back on. It spins now and it has never once appeared on a machine. He was straight about all of it when he rang, including having done it at his desk, and what he wanted to know was what that had cost them.
| Media | A 4TB external drive that fell a short distance onto a rug while running, buzzed and stopped. It was opened at the customer's office, where a head found resting on a platter was freed by hand. It spins on power and is never presented to a machine. |
| What was reported | External drive knocked off a desk while in use, a short fall onto a rug, a buzz and then silence, opened the same afternoon by the firm's IT man, a head found out on the disk and lifted clear, spins but never appears, no marks visible to the naked eye, three years of design work on it. |
| Fault class | Head damage from the impact. The drive was running, so the heads were flying over the surfaces rather than parked at the side, and the knock put one down on a platter and left it stuck there. The buzz was the actuator pulling against an assembly that would not come. Freeing it restored the movement and not the reading, because a slider that has been in contact and then dragged off is no longer a working head. |
| On the bench | Not powered after arrival. Opened under laminar flow with the head assembly, the ramp and both surfaces examined under a stereo microscope, and the particulate taken in while it stood open assessed before the spindle was turned at all. The surfaces cleaned where deposits had settled on them, a matched donor set fitted in place of the freed head and its partner, and the alignment established before a single track was read. Imaged surface by surface on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, the sound one taken to completion first and the marked arc left until last at reduced speed, with the project files parsed in R-Studio and opened before release. |
A knock while it is running is a different event from the same knock switched off. An idle drive keeps its heads off the platters altogether, and a short fall does very little to it. A working one has them flying a few nanometres above a surface turning at speed, with nowhere to go if the whole assembly is shoved sideways. They land, and where they land they tend to stay. The buzz he heard was the actuator hauling at heads that would not lift.
Freeing the head was a reasonable move and it did cost something. Two things went against the drive that afternoon and neither of them was the freeing itself. The first is that it stood open in an ordinary office, and a disk breathes through a filter for a reason: whatever a room holds settles on a platter and becomes an abrasive the moment the thing spins up. The second is that a slider stuck to a surface has to be persuaded off it, and it takes a little of the surface with it. The lid had to come off in any event, so none of this changed the price. It changed the odds, and the honest measure of by how much is that the marked band was wider than it would have been and there was cleaning to do before new heads could be trusted over it.
Platters that look clean to the eye are worth knowing about and are not the assessment. His report of no visible damage was useful and it was made in office light with the naked eye. A scratch anyone can see is a catastrophe; the marking that actually costs you files is a band a few microns across that shows up under magnification held at an angle, and settled contamination looks like nothing whatever until the disk turns. So the encouraging news was written down and then checked properly, which is the only order that helps anybody.
The answer to a damaged head is another head, and it has to be the right one. Donor parts are matched by family, by capacity and often by manufacturing batch, because an assembly written for one drive's geometry cannot follow another's tracks. They go in under filtered air with the platters never touched, the alignment is set on the bench, and the drive is then read rather than returned to service. It also explains the symptom he described: a drive that cannot read the reserved area holding its own settings never gets as far as telling a computer what it is, so it spins and stays silent, and no amount of switching it on and off gets past that.
Nothing was powered before it was opened. Under laminar flow the top surface carried dust and two fibres, one of them long enough to see unaided, which is what a few hours open in an office buys you. The head that had been freed was chipped at the corner of its slider and the suspension was slightly out of true. A fine arc of contact marking ran about a third of the way out on that surface, while the lower head and its platter were sound.
The surfaces were cleaned where deposits had settled and both were examined again at magnification before anything turned. A matched donor set replaced the freed head and its partner, and the alignment was set on the bench. Imaging ran head by head on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA, taking the sound surface to completion first and then working the marked arc last, slowly and from both directions. R-Studio read the filesystem out of the finished image and the project folders were opened at the bench.
The current work came back whole and so did most of the archive. The marked arc cost a run of about six hundred files from a job finished two years ago, largely scan data and rendered frames, and those were listed by name and date so the studio could see what was missing instead of discovering it later. The client had been sent finished versions of nearly all of them at the time, which is the sort of luck that only ever falls to people who deliver their work somewhere else.
One disk is £300 + VAT. The lid coming off and a donor set going in is mechanical work, named in the published exclusion, so 50% of the figure was payable before the bench started and the balance once the design team had opened the files. That figure is the same whether or not somebody has already been inside; what an earlier attempt changes is the result rather than the invoice.
Do not power it again, and ask whoever opened it to go no further. Freeing a head is a sensible-looking act with a hidden bill: the drive has to be opened by a laboratory in any case, so the money does not move, but the minutes it spends open in a room full of ordinary air, and the contact involved in getting a stuck slider off a surface, both come out of the result. If it is already open, put the cover back on with its screws and leave it, rather than blowing the dust off, touching a platter or turning the spindle by hand to see whether it moves freely. Then say plainly what was done, by whom, with what, for how long, and whether it was run afterwards and how often. Nobody at this end is keeping score: an accurate account of the last fortnight decides where the bench looks first and what it expects to find, and it is worth a great deal more than a tidy story. Send the unit as it stands, cover on and screws in, packed so the drive itself cannot move inside the box.
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 quoted chance of fifty-fifty is an honest way of saying the answer is in the geometry
A drive somebody has already opened? Ring 0800 689 0668 before anyone powers it again. One disk is £300 + VAT, and the free assessment says what the earlier attempt has cost you.