A surveying firm in Coventry that flies drones over roofs, roundabouts and half-built industrial units keeps its raw footage on a LaCie desktop drive. The socket had been loose for months and the drive had been switching itself off ever since, at first now and then and lately every few minutes, so that no copy off it ever finished. Somebody had taken to wedging the cable with a folded envelope to hold the connection still. There were around 3.5TB of footage on it and a report due at the end of the week that needed three of the surveys in it.
| Media | A LaCie desktop drive with a loose socket that cuts the power every few minutes, so the volume drops out mid-copy and nothing ever completes. It holds around 3.5TB of aerial survey footage needed for a report. |
| What was reported | LaCie desktop external, socket loose for months, the drive switching itself off repeatedly and dropping out during every copy, the cable wedged with paper to hold it in place, around 3.5TB of footage on it, three surveys needed for a report at the end of the week. |
| Fault class | A connection fault in the enclosure rather than a fault in the disk. The socket had cracked away at its joints, so the supply broke whenever the cable moved. The disk itself was healthy; what it had been through was several hundred power cuts with writes in flight, which left the filesystem disagreeing with itself rather than the surfaces damaged. |
| On the bench | The enclosure opened and the socket examined under a stereo microscope, where two joints were found cracked through and a third lifting off its pad. Nothing was repaired, because no repair was needed to read the disk: it was taken out of the case and read directly behind a hardware write blocker on a steady supply. Imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in one pass, with the three surveys the report needed taken first. The volume rebuilt in R-Studio from the image, and clips from every survey played before the set went to fresh media. |
A drive that switches itself off is usually being switched off. The socket carries the supply as well as the data, and a joint that has cracked makes and breaks as the cable is moved or as the metal warms. From a desk it looks as though the unit has a mind of its own; on the bench it is an open circuit that closes again when you press on it. The disk inside had done nothing wrong and was being cut off in mid-sentence several times an hour.
What the power cuts cost was the bookkeeping, not the footage. Every unexpected cut catches the drive with writes in the air and the filesystem partway through a change it fully intended to finish. One of those is nothing at all. Several hundred leave a volume whose records no longer agree with one another, which is why no copy ever completed and why it had begun to take minutes to appear. The video had been written years earlier and sat exactly where it was put, untouched by any of it.
The broken part was not worth mending, so it was not mended. An enclosure exists to give a disk a socket and a supply. Once the disk is out of it and on a steady bench supply, the cracked joints have nothing to do with the recovery, and reworking them would have meant putting an iron near the one object standing between the customer and 3.5TB of footage. It would also have moved the job across the line into electronics work and the terms that go with that. There was no reason to do either.
Urgency is answered by doing it once, properly. A fortnight of wedging a cable and restarting a copy had produced nothing whatever, while a single pass on a steady supply produced all of it. The honest part is that a pass over 3.5TB is measured in hours rather than minutes, which is why the surveys the report needed were imaged first and the deadline never depended on the whole disk finishing. Work of this kind closes inside the two to four working days a single drive is quoted at, and no amount of asking makes platters turn faster.
The case came apart under magnification. Two joints at the socket were cracked clean through and a third was lifting off its pad, which accounted for every symptom described, and the disk behind it was unmarked, quiet and free of any sign that it had ever been dropped. Nothing was reworked, because nothing needed to be.
The disk went onto a steady supply behind a hardware write blocker and stayed up, which it had not managed for weeks. It imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA in a single pass with no weak areas at all, the three surveys the report needed taken first and the remainder in order afterwards. R-Studio then rebuilt the volume from the image: the journal had been left unfinished by the last of the cuts, so the tree was assembled from the surviving records rather than trusted as it stood.
Every completed survey came back and the report went out on the Friday. The only losses were three clips that had been open and being written at the moment the power dropped, which came back cut off at that point. The disk was sound and went home in a new caddy; the old case was not worth mending and did not go back. They were also told what they had probably worked out for themselves, that the only copy of 3.5TB of footage had been sitting behind a socket for months.
One disk is £300 + VAT, and it is £300 + VAT at 3.5TB exactly as it is at 500GB, because the figure follows the media rather than the capacity. Nothing was opened and no repair was carried out, so no fix, no fee applied and the invoice went out after the report had gone.
Stop propping the cable up and unplug it. Every cut is a shutdown with the disk still turning and writes still in the air, and while one of those costs nothing, hundreds leave a volume whose own records disagree, which is a second fault stacked on top of the first. Do not run a repair tool afterwards to tidy up the mess, because it writes its conclusions onto the disk and can turn a rebuildable volume into a folder of fragments. If the drive does stay up for a while, copy the single most valuable folder rather than the whole disk, and do not start a copy you already know will not finish. Do not cut the case open to get at the drive: an external in its own enclosure travels whole, so send the unit as it is with its cable, which has the advantage that the socket can be looked at as well. Say how long it has been dropping out, how many times it has been tried and how large the disk is, because a big drive read carefully is a job measured in hours and it is better to know that before the week you need it.
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.
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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 keeps dropping out? Ring 0800 689 0668 and stop wedging the cable. One disk is £300 + VAT whatever its size, and the diagnostic is free.